Five Years Older
by nicnac918
Summary: When twenty-seven year old Mabel Pines stumbles across a banged-up time tape in the park, she tells herself that she's much too mature and responsible now to use it to go on crazy adventures through time. Hahaha, yeah right. Reverse Timestuck
1. Chapter 1

Stan carefully pushed the back door to the bar shut and looked around the empty alley. Good, it looked like no one noticed him slipping out. Now all he had to do was get to his car and–

There was a bright flash of light, and then suddenly there was a woman sitting down in the middle of the previously empty alley. "Oof. That's not supposed to happen," she said. She looked down at her lap and frowned at what looked like some sort of broken machine sitting there. "Okay, that's _definitely_ not supposed to happen. Well, Mr. Tape Measure, let's keep you safe until I can figure out what's going on." She tucked the machine inside her sweater, then stood up and dusted herself off.

"What the hell just happened?" Stan demanded, finally finding his voice.

The woman turned to look at him, and her expression lit up like the Fourth of July. At first Stan thought she'd mistaken him for someone else in the dark, but then she cried, "Stan!" before running over and hugging him.

Okay, well, there were a lot of guys named Stan out there, right? It was a pretty common name. And there might be at least one that looked enough like him to get her confused. At least one besides the one he was related to, that was. Because Stan was pretty sure he'd remember this one if he'd met her before. Not to mention she'd probably be slapping him right now, not hugging him. "Lady, I think you got me mixed up with someone else."

"Not a chance. I'd know you anywhere, anywhen, Stanley Pines," she said. She released him from her hug, but only so she could grab him by the shoulders. "Just look at you! You're so cute and little right now. You're practically a baby. And you've got a mullet! That is a truly unfortunate choice in hairstyles, but somehow you make it almost work. I'm so glad I ran into you here. I mean now."

Stan wasn't sure he appreciated being called a baby by someone who looked like she was maybe only a couple years older than him. Besides, he was twenty two, and had been taking care of himself since he was seventeen; he was not a baby. Admittedly, she might have a point about the mullet though. "Look, do I know you?" he asked, shrugging her hands off his shoulders.

"Not even a little bit," she replied, her enthusiasm in no way dimmed by him trying to give her the brush off, or the fact that she'd just basically admitted to stalking him. "I'm Mabel and I'm…" she hesitated, then snapped her fingers together as though an idea suddenly occurred to her, "your fairy godmother."

"Yeah, that's both believable and convincing," Stan replied sarcastically.

"Just because you don't believe it doesn't make it less true," Mabel said.

"And just because you said it doesn't make it more true. In fact, given the serious questions I'm starting to have about your sanity, it might actually make it less true."

Mabel laughed delightedly. "You see this," she said, pointing rapidly back and forth between the two of them. "I missed this. It's been too long since we've hung out; I'm going to have to call you up and plan a visit when I get back home."

Stan stared at her. Definitely crazy. But at least it seemed like a harmless crazy, mostly. "You know, you're making less and less sense as you go."

"Just because you don't understand it, Stanley, doesn't mean it doesn't make sense," she said, and her tone had a faint mocking lilt to it, like she was imitating someone else.

Okay, so now this was starting to get a little weird. Well, it had always been weird, but now it was starting to get freaky weird. "You sound just like Ford," Stan said. He could even remember Ford saying exactly that a time or two.

"No, I sound like Dipper," Mabel corrected. "But then those two nerds sound so much like each other, I actually probably sounded like both of them. I was doing Dipper, though."

"How the hell do you know who Ford is?" Stan demanded. Stan's real name, yeah maybe. He hadn't used it since he left New Jersey, but he'd spread it around a lot back then when he'd been trying to start up Stan Co. Enterprises and even as he switched his identity around, he still used the Stan Co. brand some, so a determined person could probably track him back. But if they had tracked him all the way back to Ford and Glass Shard Beach and Ma and Pa and Shermie that meant he was in a lot deeper trouble with someone than he realized. Not to mention he'd never meant for all his crap to touch his family; he wasn't supposed to be dragging them down any more.

Mabel answered him, as chipper and non-threatening as ever. "Whoa, calm down there Mr. Crankypants. I told you already I was your fairy godmother, didn't I? And what kind of fairy godmother would I be if I didn't even know your brother's name?"

"Lady, you are not my fairy godmother. Do I look like Cinderella to you?" Stan said.

"Psch, Cinderella wishes she was as cool as you. And I am too your fairy godmother. How can I prove it to you?" Mabel asked.

"Do some magic," Stan said.

"About that," Mabel said. "I can't just do magic all the time any time. There are a couple of provisos, a few quid pro quo…"

"Uh-huh," Stan said. "Alright crazy lady, I'm out of here."

"Wait no, you can't go. Give me some other way to prove it," Mabel said.

"Fine," Stan said. Truth was, he didn't feel comfortable leaving until he figured out how Mabel knew who Ford was anyway. "If you're my fairy godmother, then you've been looking out for me my whole life, right? So tell me about something from when I was a kid, something that not just anyone could know."

Mabel frowned thoughtfully and tapped her chin a couple times. Then she smiled and held one hand up in the air. "High six?"

So that was something. It hadn't been exactly a secret or anything, but it was something between just him and Ford. It definitely wasn't the kind a thing that some goon or government spook was likely to dig up if they were looking into his past. He wasn't saying he actually believed this fairy godmother crock, but obviously there was something else going on here.

Stan didn't accept her offer of a high "six" – it felt too weird without Ford, especially after the last time, even if this would really technically be a high five – but something must've shown in his expression because her smile grew. "See? Told you. Besides, do you have a better explanation for how I just appeared out of nowhere?" Stan didn't, but that didn't mean that fairy godmother as a good explanation, or that a better one didn't exist; he wasn't the genius in the family. "And now for my next feat… actually, what year is it?"

"What _year_ is it?" Stan echoed. "What, you don't got calendars in fairy world?"

"Hey, the passage of time can be really weird in other dimensions. It's always a good idea to check," Mabel said.

"It's 1975," Stan told her.

"1975 plus 6 is 1981," Mabel whispered under her breath, then frowned. "What's the date?"

"July 22nd," Stan said.

"Perfect!" she said, clapping her hands together. "And now for my next feat, I'm going to take you to meet your Prince Charming."

Stan grimaced. "Wait a second. I don't know how things work in fairy world, and I don't really care what people do behind closed doors, because honestly it's not like I'm in any place to judge anyone, but I am definitely not looking for a Prince Charming."

"What do you mean- oh, ewww, no, gross," Mabel said. "Why would you even say that? No, we're going on an adventure to find your _platonic_ Prince Charming. Definitely platonic."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Stan asked, but Mabel wasn't listening.

"Onwards to Gravity Falls, Oregon!" she cried, holding a set of car keys up in the air. _His_ car keys.

"How the hell did you get those?" Stan asked, patting down his pocket to confirm that his keys really were gone. "What, are you allowed to use magic to steal my car keys?"

"I didn't use magic, silly. I just picked your pocket when I hugged you," Mabel said.

Stan felt a bit dumbfounded. She picked his pocket? Without him noticing? Stan Pines picked other people's pockets, he did not get his pocket picked. Not anymore.

"Don't get too worked up about it. I did learn from the best," Mabel said, giving him a wink. "So are we doing this thing or what?"

"Sure, but I'm driving," Stan said, holding out his hand for the keys.

Mabel narrowed her eyes and pointed an accusatory finger at him. "I'm on to you, Mister. You can have these back after we're in the car."

Well, shit.

So on the one hand, assuming that Mabel wasn't actually his fairy godmother – which, to be honest, he was less sure about now than he would have been ten minutes ago – she was probably some kind of stalker and almost certainly crazy. Plus, she had pickpocketed him. On the other hand, she had pickpocketed _him_ , and she seemed to think quick enough on her feet to keep up with him, if not more so. And Stan had been planning on skipping town tonight anyway, and Oregon was as good a place to go as any. Better even, since none of the states he'd been banned from were on the west coast. And, whatever mixed-up, crazy reason she had for it, Mabel seemed to actually like him. That wasn't something Stan could say about many people. Possibly any at all.

"Fine, we can go on your crazy road trip. Car's this way," Stan said, leading the way back down the alley to the main street.

"Yay! Road trip with Stan. Oh man, this is going to be the best," Mabel cried gleefully, with an actual bounce in her step.

"Yeah, yeah," Stan groused, trying to hide the small smile intent on stealing its way across his face.

Of course, Mabel saw it anyway. "Look at you smiling," she said, poking him in the cheek. "You're just a big soft marshmallow, aren't ya? A big soft marshmallow and you love me already."

"Knock it off before I change my mind," Stan threatened, batting her hand away. But his heart wasn't totally in it, and Mabel could obviously tell. Because while she did stop poking him, at least, her steps didn't get any less bouncy.

"And another thing, Miss 'Fairy Godmother,'" Stan added. "You're nuts if you think we're gonna make it to Oregon by midnight. Well, more nuts."

"Why, where are we now?"

Stan honestly wasn't even surprised any more. "Chicago."

"Wow, that's _really_ not supposed to happen," Mabel said, looking concerned. Then she just shrugged it off and went right back to being way too chipper. "Oh well, no sense in worrying about it now. And don't you worry about your curfew either, Cinderella. I've got all the time in the world."

* * *

AN: So I was meant to be working on something else and somehow this happened. Reverse Timestuck. And I have to say, after immediately coming up with Reverse Timestuck to describe this AU, I spent way too long debating as to whether that was the right way to call it. I ended up deciding that Reverse Timestuck is Older Mabel going back to a Mullet Stan, Inverse Timestuck is Younger Dipper going back to Mullet Stan, and Relativity Timestuck is Younger Stan going back in time to Young Adult Grauntie Mabel.

Title is a reference to thesnadger's lovely Timestuck story Five minutes Older because I am shameless, apparently.


	2. Chapter 2

A hand shaking his shoulder woke Stan up, and for a second he panicked. He was sleeping in his car, he knew he was because he'd done it enough times over the past few years to recognize it even while half asleep. But if he was in his car and the door was locked, and he would never be so stupid as to not lock the door, then who the hell was shaking him?

"Stan, wake up. The store's open," Mabel said.

Right, Mabel. Last night Stan had somehow ended up agreeing to go on a cross-country road trip to Oregon with his fairy godmother/crazy stalker – jury was still out as to which she was. They had been on the road for all of twenty minutes when she screamed at him to pull over. He'd nearly had a heart attack, jerking the wheel and slamming on the brakes. But just as he was half, two thirds expecting to be killed by his crazy stalker who was less harmless than previously assumed, Mabel explained that she had seen a yarn store a block back – a freaking yarn store – and that she wanted to pick up a few things. When, to the surprise of nobody but Mabel, the yarn store turned out to be closed in the middle of the night, she insisted in sleeping in the car out in front of the store, so she could get her stuff first thing in the morning and they wouldn't forget before they left town. Stan had agreed, mostly because he had been debating how to tell her that unless she was going to put up for a room for the night, they were going to have to be sleeping in the car anyway.

"So go get your stuff and we can leave after you get back," Stan said. He wanted to sleep for a few more minutes.

"Staaan. I want you to come with me," Mabel said.

Stan was about to protest that he didn't see what she needed him for in a yarn store, but then he realized it was probably less about needing him, and more about not wanting to leave him in the car alone where he could just decide to leave without her. Stan wasn't _planning_ on doing that, but he couldn't say it was a bad idea on her part to remove the temptation. He considered just giving her the car keys again so she could go off and do her thing without worrying about it, but that seemed like it would be setting a dangerous precedent. Of course, so was agreeing to get up when she asked and following her around a yarn store, but it was still probably the less dangerous of the two.

Besides, that was what you were supposed to do when you were taking a trip around the world, or across the country with someone, right? Go on adventures with them and stuff? Of course, they weren't likely to run into much in the way of adventure in a yarn store. And there weren't any beaches between here and Oregon, but come to think of it, Mabel was technically a babe, wasn't she? And hey, maybe they'd find something that could vaguely be considered treasure in 'The Knit Store.'

Yeah, this was going to be terrible.

It was definitely terrible. Mabel ran around the store for what felt like hours, but was probably only forty five minutes or so, reading the labels on the different yarns, occasionally picking up a ball of it and squishing it to test the yarn's "smoosh-ability" and rubbing it against her face. Stan tried sitting down at the little table in the middle of the store a couple times, but whenever he did Mabel would call him over to ask his opinion. Though he didn't know why she was bothering to ask in the first place, since whenever he told her he thought the particular thing of yarn she had just handed him was fine – honestly he had no opinion on the quality of yarn, but he did have the vague hope that if he said he liked it she would get it so they could leave already – she just frowned and put it back before running off to check something else out.

"What do you think about this one?" Mabel asked turning around – Stan had given up on trying to catch a nap at the table and was now just following her around – and depositing what felt like the hundredth ball of yarn in his hands.

"It's great," Stan said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, which at this point wasn't much. He frowned. "It's kind of itchy though, isn't it?"

"Perfect!" Mabel said. So apparently she wanted his opinion as a measure of what not to do. So what else was new? "Itchy is exactly what I'm going for!" Or maybe she was just crazy. "Now to pick out some colors."

Stan wasn't allowed to sit down for this part either, partially because Mabel kept wanting to know what he thought of the different colors, and actually listening to his opinions, lackluster as they were, this time, and partially because she kept needing to hold the ball of yarn up to his face for some reason. Luckily this part of the trip took much less time than picking out the type of yarn she wanted, so it wasn't too long before Mabel had an armful of yarn she was happy with, and was leading him up to the front counter, grabbing a set of knitting needles on the way.

The guy working the register was, well, a guy first off, and he looked either a bit older or a whole lot younger than a guy Stan would have expected to be working in a yarn shop to be, like in his mid-twenties or something. He also had the arrogant air of someone who knew they were ridiculously good-looking, and knew exactly how to use that to get what they wanted. Stan would be willing to bet good money that the guy had taken the job at the yarn shop because he thought it would be a good way to pick up chicks, and Stan kind of wanted to punch him. On principle, definitely not because the guy had kept sending Stan condescending looks as Stan had followed Mabel around the store.

"Hey gorgeous," the guy said as he started ringing up Mabel's stuff. "Did you find everything okay, or was there something else you needed? Maybe something that I can get for you?"

The way Stan saw it, there were two possibilities here. The first was that pretty boy here assumed that Mabel wasn't Stan's girlfriend, and that Stan had just let some random woman drag him into and around a yarn store all morning. Not that he would be wrong for thinking that, since that's pretty much exactly what had happened, but Stan didn't really want people assuming that about him. The other possibility was he'd come to the probably more likely seeming, if untrue, conclusion that Mabel _was_ Stan's girlfriend, and then decided that he was so much better than Stan, he could just hit on Mabel right in front of him anyway. Which also wasn't entirely wrong. The smug jerk, with his adequate hygiene and his gainful employment and his proportionally sized nose.

"Nope, I got everything I need," Mabel replied, apparently cheerfully oblivious to the way the guy was coming on to her. Stan felt a bit of relief at that, then immediately pretended he hadn't.

Mabel started to reach for her back pocket, but before she could pull out her wallet she suddenly drooped and gave a very guilty, "Oops."

"What?" Stan asked suspiciously.

"So I may have forgotten that I don't have any money on me that I can use here," Mabel said with a weak smile.

"Let me guess, all you got is fairy money," said Stan.

"Something like that," Mabel agreed. She clapped her hands together in front of her and looked at him with big eyes. "Can I please borrow some money to buy this stuff? I promise I'll pay you back. Possibly soon-ish and possibly not for a very, very long time, but I will definitely pay you back, okay? Please?"

One of Stan's first rules is that no one ever paid you back. He sure as hell didn't; that was the main reason behind why he wasn't allowed in Boston anymore. Well, that and he was banned from the entire state of Massachusetts, but that was a separate issue. The point was, when you "leant" someone money you were really just giving it to them. And Stan's number one rule was to never give anyone something for nothing. Technically he was bending that rule a little bit right now, giving Mabel a ride to Oregon, but since it wasn't costing him anything extra to let her ride in his car and he was already going to Oregon anyway – well, going to somewhere that wasn't Chicago – he figured it was probably okay. But he definitely wasn't giving her money, no matter how pleading her expression was or how big and soft and pathetic her eyes looked.

Shit.

Before Stan could put his foot in his mouth – he had no clue what he had been going to say, but he was pretty sure it would have been the wrong thing regardless – pretty boy spoke up. "I could give you my employee discount, to make things a little easier on your _friend_ here."

"That's so nice of you," Mabel said, flashing the guy a quick grin before turning her attention back to Stan. "See, we get the employee discount and we're not even employees. That's practically free money; you can't say no to free money."

"You know," the guy said, not looking too pleased at the way Mabel was almost ignoring him, "I could give you all of it for free, if you agreed to go out with me. I could pick you up tonight at around eight?"

"No, thank you; Stan's got me covered," Mabel responded without missing a beat or even looking at the guy really. So maybe she hadn't been as completely oblivious as she had been acting. "You've got me covered, right Stan?"

Stan almost wanted to say yes now, if only to rub it in pretty boy's face, but before he could, pretty boy reached out and put a hand on Mabel's arm. "Hey wait a second, we're just talking one little date here. I mean, I did give you the employee discount, you kind of owe me, sweetie."

Mabel slowly turned and smiled at the guy. It was freaking terrifying. The guy pulled his hand away from her like he had been burned, and Mabel's smile grew, which only made it more terrifying. "Let me make one thing very clear: neither I nor any other member of the female gender owe you anything. And the first and last time that sort passive aggressive bull worked on me was when I was twelve years old. And then my brother and my uncle and I got the kid who tried it thrown in jail, actual adult prison, and after that there's nothing you can say that will intimidate me. So my friend Stan is going to pay for this yarn, with the employee discount which you offered us, and then I am going to take my stuff and leave. And if you touch me or call me sweetie again, I will cheerfully cut your balls off."

Stan immediately got his wallet out to pay. Because that had possibly been the scariest thing he had ever seen – and also the hottest, but he wasn't stupid enough to say that, or even think it very hard at the moment – and there was no way he wasn't doing exactly what Mabel had just told him to. Pretty boy seemed to agree, and a minute later Stan and Mabel were walking back to the car with a bag full of yarn.

"Well, that was a great start to the day," Mabel said. Stan would have assumed it was sarcasm, but it sure didn't sound sarcastic, and when he took a close look at her expression, she seemed genuinely cheerful.

"You're serious," Stan said.

"Yeah, it was a fantastic morning! I got to go to a new yarn store, I got to hang out with you, and this project… Man, it's something I've been wanting to do for forever, but by the time I originally came up with the idea, it wasn't really needed anymore, but now I've got the perfect opportunity to do it. It's super exciting," Mabel said, bouncing a little.

"You just threatened to cut a man's balls off," Stan said slowly. "Because he asked you out on a date."

"Psh, he's a jerk; I'm not going to let that ruin my day. And I didn't threaten him because he asked me out on a date. Anyone can ask me out, boys, girls, creepy old men, little kids, supernatural creatures, eldritch horrors, whatever; I know I'm basically irresistible. But he didn't take no for an answer. No means no." She pointed an accusatory finger at Stan and regarded him with a narrow-eyed look. "You got that? No means no."

A part of Stan wanted to ask about what if the girl was just playing hard to get, but a much larger part of him liked his balls right where they were, thanks, so he parroted back, "No means no."

They'd reached the car by then, and he unlocked the passenger door and opened it for her. "Good," Mabel said, climbing in. "You've got to treat women with respect, Stan. And don't lead them on. And definitely don't lead multiple girls on at once. And-" Stan shut her door, leaving the rest of her lecture muffled as he walked around the car, only opening his door in time to catch the tail end of it "-but only if you're one hundred percent sure she's actually a giant spider."

"Got it. I will make sure to do or not do all of those things," Stan said. If for no other reason than regardless of whether Mabel was a crazy stalker or a fairy godmother, she was bound to find out if Stan hadn't been keeping to her standards, and he really, really did not want to have his balls chopped off.

"You better. Don't be a jerk like I know you can be sometimes. Or like that guy in the yarn store," Mabel said.

"Or the guy who harassed you when you were a kid?" Stan suggested. That kind of freaked him out a bit, honestly. What on Earth could a twelve year old have done to her to be bad enough to get thrown in adult prison? Though, Mabel had said she was twelve, maybe the kid harassing had been older… That didn't really make it any better.

"Yeah, you don't want to be like Lil' Gideon," Mabel agreed, sounding almost amused at the prospect. "I mean, he's mostly okay now, that is, he was mostly okay after he grew up, and we're sort of friends even, as much as you can be friends with someone who once attacked your brother with a pair of sheep shears. But that was after the apocalypse happened for a couple of days and made everyone rethink a lot of things. Specifically, it made Gideon rethink what a massive evil jerk he was being. So yeah, don't be like that."

"I'm just not going to comment on any of that," Stan decided. He turned the key in the ignition and put the car into gear. "Let's blow this town. And hey, now that you know that I know you're terrifying, you don't have to worry about me ditching you on the side of the road somewhere anymore."

"Why would I be worried about that?" Mabel asked, as if the idea were completely ridiculous. "I know you aren't going to leave me."

"What are you talking about? You dragged me into the yarn store just this morning so I wouldn't drive off while you were getting your stuff," Stan reminded her.

"Whaaat?" Mabel gave him a funny look, then shook her head at him and smiled. "You're being cray-cray, Stan," she said, fishing in her bag and pulling out the knitting needles and the sort of reddish yarn that she'd gotten more of than the other colors. "I wanted you to come to the store with me because I wanted you to come to the store with me. Well, I wanted you to come a little bit so you could help me pick out the right yarn for my project, but mostly because I wanted to hang out with you, silly."

Oh. Well. Huh. Stan drove toward the highway, leaving the car radio off in favor of Mabel's bright chatter about how they should get breakfast and did he know anywhere nearby that made good pancakes, and the rhythmic clatter of knitting needles.

Maybe it had been a pretty okay morning after all.


	3. Chapter 3

They were about two hours out from Chicago when Stan had to stop for gas. So he pulled into a self-service station and hopped out to fill the car up, but then was surprised when Mabel got out of the car too. "Did you need to use the bathroom or something?"

"Or something," Mabel agreed brightly before running off in the direction of a shopping center just across the way. Stan watched her go for a minute, then peered back inside the car to reassure himself that all her knitting stuff was still there. She wouldn't leave without all that, right? It was going to be fine.

Or at least, that's what Stan told himself, but he still found himself looking to see if he could spot Mabel when he came back out from paying the guy inside. It wasn't hard; if anything it would have been harder to miss her in that bright green sweater she had on. She was in the parking lot talking with huge animated gestures to some guy. Stan felt his hackles start to raise, especially when Mabel hugged the guy, but immediately after that she ditched him and ran up to some woman pushing a stroller and started talking to her. That conversation ended with the lady shaking her head, it looked like, and Mabel giving her a hug too. Then Mabel glanced over at Stan and waved when she saw him before running up to some old man. After that Stan forced himself to look away and focus on his car. It was going to be _fine_.

It took until after Stan had finished filling the tank up with gas – it was a good thing he'd made out so well in Chicago, because this cross-country trip was going to get expensive fast with all the gas he was going to have to be buying – and had almost finished cleaning off all the windows on the car before Mabel popped back up. "Guess what, there's a Pancake Hut in that shopping center over there, and since _someone_ wouldn't let us stop for breakfast…" Stan turned around to tell her that he wasn't buying some fancy lunch for her, but stopped dead when he saw the wad of cash in her had that she was fanning herself with. "…lunch is on me," Mabel concluded with a brilliant grin.

"You didn't steal that money, did you?" Stan asked. Not that he had any problem with stealing, but if she had stolen that much, then they really should get the hell out of here now. They could always pull over and let her buy him food a couple of exits down the highway.

"Stan, I am offended; I would never steal. Mostly never," Mabel said.

"You pickpocketed my car keys less than twenty-four hours ago," Stan reminded her.

"Psh, that wasn't stealing, that was borrowing without asking. I gave them back to you," Mabel argued. "And I didn't steal this money, people gave it to me. Now come on, I'm starving." Mabel climbed back in the car, and Stan didn't really have any choice but to follow her.

"Nobody just gave you all that money," Stan said as he put the car in gear and started driving over to the parking lot Mabel had just been running around in.

"Not one person, lots of people," Mabel replied. "I told them that I have an adorable little nephew, and I was trying to get this little guy home and I didn't have any money for gas and most everyone gave me a dollar or two or some change and Mr. Cook, who is the sweetest old man, gave me a twenty."

"You got a twenty by telling someone a fake sob story?" Stan demanded.

"Fake? I guarantee you all of my sob story was one hundred percent real, mister," Mabel said.

"I'm pretty sure I'm not your nephew," Stan said. "And you said we were going to see some Prince Charming, not home. Plus I'm from New Jersey, not Oregon."

"I never said you were my nephew. I just said that I have an adorable nephew, which I do, and two adorable nieces. Well, technically I'm not actually related to Soos and Melody's kids, but they call me Aunt Mabel and we're all family anyway, so it counts," Mabel said. "And I am too taking you home little guy. Sure you might be from New Jersey, but that doesn't mean it's where your home is. I mean think about it, Cinderella moved into the castle after she met Prince Charming, right? And you're going to move in with your Prince Charming too."

"Yeah, Cinderella moved in with the guy because they got married, and that ain't happening for a number of reasons, which I already told you," Stan said.

"And I already told you he's your _platonic_ Prince Charming. Stop saying gross things," Mabel retorted, and yeah, Stan still didn't know what that meant. But he was pulling into a parking space when she said it, and before he could ask her to explain, she had already jumped out and started running off to the diner.

Running of with her really long legs. And it was hard to tell since Mabel wasn't apparently as fond of hotpants as Carla had been, but they seemed like they were really nice legs too. Now there was a thought. Sure Mabel was probably crazy, but Stan's dealt with a lot worse than that over the past couple of years. And she was really good looking, and enthusiastic and funny and smart. Not super genius smart like Ford was, but people like that always ended up ditching stupid people like Stan at some point or other anyway. But Mabel was street smart, real clever – she'd made at least thirty dollars in less than fifteen minutes. Stan had never made that much money that fast in his life.

And more importantly, Stan thought as Mabel held the door open for him and grinned, she actually liked him. Who knew why, but she'd said it enough times that it must be true. Plus she laughed at his jokes and seemed to enjoy talking to him and maybe this could work out okay. Heck, even if she said no, at least she wouldn't still think he was a queer. And if she did say no, as long as he took that for an answer, she said she wouldn't be bothered by it, right? So yeah, it could work out okay, if he could just figure out how to do it.

Stan considered that as he slid into the booth across from Mabel. She was smiling at him and opened her mouth to start to say something, but then slowly closed it again as she stared at him intently. "No," she said forcefully, pointing a finger right at his forehead. "No. Those are bad thoughts. Those are gross, icky thoughts and you need to stop thinking them right now, and then never ever think them again."

Oh. Right. Of course someone like Mabel wouldn't be into a guy like Stan. She might be completely loony, but she wasn't that loony. Because she still had a lot going for her, and what did Stan have going for him? Absolutely nothing, that's what. He was just a worthless screw-up and he was stupid to ever think trying to ask her out was ever a good idea. He was just lucky she'd cut him off before he'd actually said anything; now he could deny he ever was going to say anything in the first place, and they could get back to where they had been before he nearly screwed it all up again.

"Oh, no," Mabel said, climbing over the top of the table to slide into the seat next to Stan. "Don't be sad Stan because I love you so, so much." She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him into a tight hug.

"You know, I feel like I'm getting mixed messages here," Stan objected, but he hugged her back anyway, because what else was he supposed to do when a beautiful woman was holding on to him? Except this didn't really feel like getting held by a beautiful woman; it wasn't coy or flirtatious or seductive or anything like that. It was comfortable and safe and reassuring, almost like getting a hug from his Ma – not that Ma wasn't a beautiful woman.

"They aren't mixed messages, silly; you just aren't reading them right," Mabel told him, still not letting go. "I do love you, but I want you to think of me as your adorable little niece."

"I'm pretty sure you're older than me," Stan said, pulling away to give her a weird look. Even if she wasn't, he definitely wasn't old enough to be her uncle.

"I want you to think of me as your cool older sister," Mabel said without missing a beat. "Wait a second, I really _am_ older than you now. I knew this day would come! Dipper said I was being crazy and 'when you're older than me' was just another way to say no, but I showed him."

"Yeah, I don't know what any of that is about," Stan said. "But as far as the older sister thing goes, I can tell you I haven't had very good luck with family."

Mabel scowled. "That guy is not your family. He what, kicked you out and gave up on you forever because you made one little mistake? He's not family, he's just the worst. Well, okay, not worse than Bill, but we're definitely talking top ten worse of all time material here."

"Ford ain't _that_ bad," Stan said. Sure, maybe Stan was still a little bit, okay, a lot bit, angry at Ford for just leaving Stan behind like that, but Stan got it, sort of. Ford was smart and going places, and Stan, he just wasn't. Ford was just looking out for number on is all, and sure Stan would never do that to Ford, but it didn't make Ford the worse.

"Who said anything about Ford; Ford's great. I was talking about your dad," Mabel said. "I mean, yeah Ford got mad at you, but family does mad at you sometimes, and they can even hurt you sometimes, but not they don't treat you like your dad did, like you don't even matter. Because family is also supposed to say sorry and forgive you when you mess up and support you and love you."

That all sounded nice, but it was living in a fairy tale world. Which hey, she obviously was, given the whole fairy godmother and Prince Charming shtick. Besides, "You and me aren't actually family."

"Of course we're family! We," Mabel started to say, but was cut off when their waitress came over to take their drink order.

"Do you have chocolate milkshakes?" Mabel asked her.

"No, but we've got hot chocolate," the waitress answered.

"We'll take two mugs, with as much whipped cream as you can fit on it," Mabel said. Stan thought about objecting to her ordering for him, but if she was paying, well then he could go for some hot chocolate.

"Sure thing. You both ready to order, or do you need another minute?"

"Another minute. But I do have a question for you: Do you think the two of us look like family?" Mabel asked, pointing back and forth between herself and Stan.

The waitress looked at the two of them for a moment and frowned. "Is there a reason why you shouldn't?"

"Besides the fact that we aren't?" Stan said.

"We are so family! Don't listen to little Stan here, he's just grumpy because he didn't have a good breakfast this morning," Mabel said, poking him in the cheek again. He smacked her hand away and glared at her, and she just grinned back, completely unbothered.

"Oh, now I definitely see it," their waitress said. "You're his big sister, right?"

"I sure am a big sister," Mabel said, making it sound like she was agreeing without actually doing anything of the kind.

"Awww. You know I never had any brothers or sisters and I just think it's so sweet watching siblings getting along. I'll go get you both your hot chocolate, and I'll make sure you get plenty of whipped cream," their waitress said and then walked off.

Once the waitress was out of earshot, Mabel turned to Stan and said triumphantly, "See? She even thinks we look like family."

"Why should her opinion matter?" Stan asked. She was just some random waitress in some random chain restaurant out in the middle of nowhere, after all. "She doesn't know anything about my life."

"Exactly, that gives her the all-important outsider's perspective. I'm telling you, Janet knows what's up," Mabel said.

"Who the heck is Janet?" said Stan.

"Our waitress; that's her name," Mabel said, pointing to the spot on her shirt where she'd be wearing a name tag if she had one. Oh, right. "Anyway," she continued solemnly, "everyone's opinion matters. Except for your dad's, because he's a poop. And unicorns. Unicorns are a bunch of lying jerks and if you ever meet one, you don't listen to it, you hear me?"

"I hear you. You still aren't making a whole lot of sense, but I hear you," Stan said.

Just then Janet came back with two mugs of hot chocolate with an impressive amount of whipped cream on top. After thanking her and asking for a few more minutes to look over the menu, Mabel took a huge swig of her hot chocolate, apparently completely unconcerned by the fact that it was, going off the heat coming off Stan's mug, still boiling hot. Then she turned to Stan and said, "Everything I'm telling you will make sense one day. When you're older." And she sounded pretty smug for someone with a big thing of whipped cream on her nose.

"You know, I'm starting to think I dodged a bullet here," Stan commented as Mabel tried to lick the whipped cream off of herself. Maybe if he said it enough times, he might start to believe it.

Mabel stopped staring cross-eyed at her nose to look at Stan and she frowned. She dealt with the whipped cream quickly – swiping it off with a finger, licking it off the finger, then wiping her finger on a napkin – then sighed, still considering Stan. "There really are some very good reasons why you and I will never ever, ever, ever, _ever_ be a couple and I promise you, you will understand some day. But for right now you should know that it has nothing to do with you not being super awesome, because you _are_ super awesome. Besides boyfriends and girlfriends and all that can come and go, but your family, your real family like you and me are family, will always be there for you when you need them. And a lot of times they'll be there to annoy you even when you don't," Mabel said, poking him playfully in the side a couple a times before continuing.

"I've had a lot of ex's, like Madison Quick 'I'll Write Your Name in My Empty Spot,' level, but less insane. Well, _I'm_ less insane, some of the people I've dated turned out to be pretty cuckoo-bananas. Or creepy. Or weird. Or a bunch of gnomes standing on top of each other, which probably counts as all three. And there were some of them I really liked, but it just never worked out for one reason or another: he was ready to settle down and I wasn't, we went off to school on opposite sides of the country and the long distance thing sucked, he turned out to be a prince of the Merpeople, and had to marry the Queen of the Manatees to prevent an undersea civil war, you know, normal relationship stuff. But even though I really did like them a lot, and even loved some of them, we still broke up. But you don't break up with family; you're stuck with them to then end. And besides, no matter how much I loved any of those long list of ex-lovers of mine, you know who I love even more?"

"Your brother?" Stan said. It would fit in with the whole family theme she had going.

"Well of course Dipper," Mabel said, rolling her eyes. "But that's not who I was talking about."

"I don't know, your best friend or something?" he guessed.

"Stan, you're so bad at this game," Mabel said, laughing a little. "I'm talking about you, dum-dum."

Stan felt the corners of his lips turn up almost in spite of himself. Maybe he was still a little disappointed to not have someone as fun and smart and nice and smoking hot as Mabel as a girlfriend, but maybe having someone like that as a big sister wouldn't be so bad either. Though if she was his sister he'd probably have to stop thinking of her as smoking hot. That could get weird. "Keep saying that" – and not just saying it, but saying it like that, easy and obvious, but also like it was important and meant something – "and I might actually start to believe it."


	4. Chapter 4

"Can I ask you a question?" Stan said, keeping his eyes fixed on the road ahead of him.

"Sure thing! I'll probably even answer it," Mabel said. Her needles kept up their steady clack-clack as she spoke, so Stan figured he could chance looking over at her. But it turned out that Mabel didn't actually need to watch what she was doing when she was knitting, apparently, because even as her hands were moving rapidly, Mabel was beaming up at him with a pearly-white opened mouthed smile. It was the kind of smile that could knock a guy off his feet, if he were into that sort of thing. Which Stan wasn't, not anymore, definitely not, not since she had declared herself his sister. Hopefully he'd do better with having a crazy sister than a nerdy brother. Could hardly do worse.

"I was wondering…" Stan started, before faltering. Mabel just kept smiling at him, like she was really enthusiastically interested in what he had to say or something. He cleared his throat and turned back to look at the road. "I was wondering what you were making."

"It's a sweater," Mabel said. "I'm going to make a pair of them."

"Yeah? You making yourself something else you can change into?" he asked. Not that he had a lot of space to judge, but even he had a few different shirts.

"No this isn't for me. Although," Mabel grabbed the neck of her sweater, held it up to her nose, and inhaled deeply. "Nah, still good for another couple of days. Nope, this sweater is for you, and the other one's going to be for Prince Charming."

"You're making me a sweater?" Stan asked. For once he didn't care that she was still set on her not-going-to-happen Prince Charming idea.

"I've made you tons of sweaters. More than a hundred, I'll bet," Mabel said.

"I've never gotten a sweater from you." Or any random sweaters from unexplained sources that could have possibly been her, that he could remember. He definitely hadn't gotten a hundred of them.

"I never said you got them from me, I just said I made them for you."

"So what, you've got a random closet somewhere full of sweaters you've made for me?" He was hoping the answer to that was no, but he couldn't say he'd be surprised if she said yes.

"You can't have a closet full of just sweaters," Mabel said. "I tried once, but then Dipper was all like 'put on some pants, Mabel,' and mom got really mad at me for throwing all my other clothes away to make room for more sweaters and then she made me pull them all out of the trash and it was really gross."

Huh. So that didn't really answer his question at all. Then something else occurred to him. "Wait a second. If you're making sweaters then why were you looking for itchy yarn to make them with?"

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in it," Mabel said with an affected sage air.

"What?"

"I work in mysterious ways. I promise it will all make sense soon; trust me," Mabel said.

"I haven't trusted anyone in a long time," Stan replied, the words coming out of his mouth almost automatically. They were still true, but he thought that maybe they were a little less true now than they had been twenty-four hours ago, no matter how much of an idiot that made him.

"I know." Mabel didn't stop smiling when she said that, but something about her expression shifted so that there was sadness in it now. This woman did not play fair. But maybe that was just what older sisters did.

Stan reached for the radio, hoping to use that to end the conversation, but Mabel interrupted him. "Hey, wait, I want to ask you a question now."

"Fine. But I make no guarantees about answering, and if I do answer I'll probably be lying," Stan said.

"Psch, you act like I've never asked you a question before. Okay, what I want to know is, what was the real question you wanted to ask me?"

"Jeez, you really don't play fair. What'd I do to be saddled with a mind reader anyway?" Stan groused.

"I'm not a mind reader, I just know you really well. Your adorable little baby face is like an open book to me." Mabel had perked right back up, and Stan was pretty sure if she hadn't been holding her knitting she would have been poking him in the cheek again. "So come on, what did you want to ask me?"

"Just… why me?"

"Because you," Mabel answered. "Wait, what's the question, exactly? Never mind, I'm sure because you is the right answer."

"That doesn't really tell me anything. Look, I know I'm a screw-up, okay? I may be stupid, but I'm smart enough to figure out that I ain't anything special. And you know enough about me that you must've figured that out too. So why would you go and try to attach yourself to me?"

The clacking of Mabel's needles stopped and from the corner of his eye Stan could see her put her knitting away and turn to stare at him. "Stan look at me for a second."

"I'm driving," he protested.

"Stan, _look at me_." That was not a tone you messed around with, so Stan gave a quick glance in her direction, and her eyes bored into him until he turned away again. "You saw how serious my face is right now?"

"Yeah."

"Good, then maybe you'll seriously believe me when I say you are not a screw-up and you are special. You are Stanly Pines and you are amazing and I love you. And if you write me a list of every person that ever made you feel like you were worthless I will hunt them all down and I will _punch them in the face_. Well, okay, I won't punch Ford in the face, because I know he only did it because you made him mad and he was being and idiot and he still loves you anyway. But the rest of them, I will so totally punch right in the face if you want me to. In fact, I've changed my mind. Turn the car around; we're going back to New Jersey so I can punch your dad in the face, and then onward to Gravity Falls."

"I'm not driving back to Jersey just so you can punch Pa in the face. I mean, I'm not going to let you punch him in the face at all." Yeah maybe Stan wished Pa had been a little nicer sometimes and wished he hadn't kicked Stan out for making a stupid mistake, but he knew that Pa had only been trying to toughen him up. He didn't deserved to get punched in the face for it, and definitely not by Mabel; Stan was willing to bet good money that Mabel punched hard.

"One day you're going to believe me when I say your dad is a huge jerk. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not for another thirty-one and a half years, but someday." Mabel picked her knitting back up and started clacking away again, apparently considering the matter closed with that.

"Wait a second, you still haven't answered my question. Why me?"

"I did too answer it. Because you," Mabel said.

"That ain't exactly a helpful answer. Look, let's just say for now that you're right about me not being a screw-up."

"Well since it's true, that's probably a good idea," Mabel agreed.

"Fine, fine, so I'm not a screw-up. Point is, that still doesn't make me special or nothing. Isn't there someone better you could have decided to latch onto?" Someone like Ford. Sure Ford wasn't perfect, but he was special, and a lot better than Stan was. Or at least, that's what everyone else seemed to think.

"First of all, better, much like morality, is relative. Personally, I would place you in a twelve-way tie for best of all time. I mean, everyone is a best in some way, but it we're talking about best best, then you're right up there," Mabel said. "But besides all that… I mentioned my uncle, right?"

"The one that helped you get that kid thrown in jail?" Stan said.

"That's the one. He's really important to me and I always want him to be happy. But for a really long time he wasn't at all. He went through all the same stuff you've been going through when he was your age, and it only got worse from there. I don't want that to happen to you," Mabel said.

So Stan reminded her of this uncle of hers, and that's why she decided to take up with him. That was fine then; it was a reasonable explanation for why him, and it was like she couldn't be reminded of her uncle and like Stan for himself too. After all she had him in a twelve-way tie for best best, which meant she must like Stan as much as she liked her uncle, however little sense that made. "Alright. But I'm not wearing that sweater if it's itchy."

"You'll wear it if I tell you to," Mabel replied, which was almost certainly true. And that was the end of that.


	5. Chapter 5

"Stop!" Mabel shouted, the sound cutting through the low background noise of the radio humming and her knitting needles clacking.

Stan, used to this after three days on the road, kept cruising right along while keeping his eyes peeled for up-coming exit signs. "You're looking at that Ferris Wheel up ahead, right?"

"Yeah. I'll bet that's the county fair that that guy was telling me about back at the Slinky museum. We have to go!" Mabel said.

Stan didn't remember anyone mentioning anything about a county fair, but he didn't think it would have mattered whether anybody has said anything to Mabel about it or not; there was no way she was going to let them drive past a Ferris Wheel without stopping to check it out. That was the crux of the reason why it was taking them so long to get to Oregon, after all.

With two drivers willing to go in shifts and keep driving through the night, it should only take about a day to get to Oregon from Chicago. Unfortunately they didn't have two drivers, because when Stan had agreed to let Mabel take the wheel on the evening of the first day, she had kept right on knitting _while she was driving_. Needless to say, Stan made her pull over immediately and refused to let her drive any more – he didn't care how many times she said she'd done it before, his car was the only thing Stan had that was worth anything, and he wasn't going to let Mabel wreck it. Not to mention he didn't particularly want to die in a fiery car crash.

Even with only one driver, the trip still should have only taken about three days, but after three days they were a little less than halfway there. Apparently Mabel's idea of a road trip involved spending just as much, if not more, time off the road than on it. She wanted them to stop at every single place for sightseeing and each and every one of the tourist traps they passed by on the way. The first time she wanted to stop to go see the "World's Largest Roll of Wrapping Paper" Stan had dismissed the place as being for gullible people looking to get swindled out of their money. To which Mabel had given him this amused look and said "And what part of swindling gullible people out of their money do you not want to be a part of?" Put like that, he could see her point.

Honestly, he liked hanging out with Mabel at all the stupid places she wanted to stop, even if it was putting them behind on schedule to get to Oregon – not like he was in any real rush to get anywhere anyway. They did the actual tourist-y stuff, and then mocked it mercilessly, and they also pulled some sort of elaborate prank at each place they went before fleeing – tradition, according to Mabel. And that wasn't even getting into the conning people.

Though Stan wasn't sure that conning was the right word for it. Conning people would be charging $3 a head for a group tour and then slipping off before anyone realized you had zero plans to do any such thing, but Mabel actually gave the tour, using information she'd gotten from brochures, plaques, and talking to the employees. Conning people would be coming up with elaborate lies to trick them into handing over their money, but Mabel just told them short stories that were at most slightly misleading and then just asked for stuff, and _people gave it to her_. Money sometimes, but also random junk from the gift shop or food or things that the tourist already had with them. One time Mabel sweet-talked a guy into selling her his instant camera – one of those fancy ones where the film developed all on its own – for $60 and then spent another $60 on film. Stan thought it was a crazy waste of money even if she did get a good deal on the camera, but she smiled at him and said "Sometimes you gotta spend money to make money," and then made $200 back selling souvenir photos to people.

Sometime in the middle of the second day Stan had asked her how she managed to get so many people to give her things. Mabel, who was rummaging around in the back seat of the car, looking for space in one of her two boxes full of junk to put the stuffed cow she had just gotten, had shrugged and said, "It's not really that hard. A lot of it is my natural charm and cuteness, but really people like doing things for strangers; it makes them feel good about themselves. You just have to give them a reason – it doesn't even have to be a good one – and know how to ask them for something that's not hard for them to give. Aha!" Mabel had cried triumphantly as she stuffed the cow somewhere. She had stood up straight again, then leaned her back against the car as she continued, "That's why I don't ask everyone for money. It's easier for me, but sometimes it's harder for other people to give away straight cash than it is for them to pay for something for you."

Stan had stared at her in blatant disbelief. "People don't like to help strangers. Maybe they like to help you, probably because you're using some kind of fairy magic on them, but ain't nobody going to give me some kind of handout just because I ask for it." Stan had learned that the hard way.

"Well you've got loads of charisma, but you're not conventionally adorable like I am," Mabel had said, like it was some kind of explanation. Then she had sighed, reached back into the car again and pulled out the jar she'd made up reading, "TOURS $3" on one side and "TIPS" on the other. She dropped the jar in his hands, shoved him off, and told him to have fun. Stan had done it, with the idea in his head that he'd probably come away with $6 and proof that Mabel was wrong and she was special. Instead he'd wound up with $56.75, eleven happy tourists, and proof that Mabel was definitely something special.

So by the time they were driving up to the county fair, Stan offered no protests about stopping, not even when it looked like they were going to have to pay to get in. He just pulled into the big parking area and then turned to Mabel and asked "What's the plan for this place?"

"It's a county fair; the plan is to have fun!" Mabel said.

"Wait, you mean you just wanted to go to the fair?" Stan asked. "No cons or money-making schemes or nothing?"

"Not unless you count beating the rigged carnival games. I mean, I like working the tourist trap circuit as much as the next guy, but sometimes you've got to take a break and just have some fun with your family. Oh, but first we've got to find someone with a both selling stuff that we can unload all this junk on," Mabel said, pointing with her thumb to the back seat and the now two-and-a-half boxes of stuff she had piled back there.

"You're not keeping all that?" Stan had assumed she had people buy all of it for her because she wanted it. Granted, it was a lot in the way of souvenirs, but Mabel seemed like the type.

"No way. I've got the only souvenir I'll ever need right here," she said, patting at her sweater. Stan had since figured out she had some kind of hidden pocket inside the stomach of her sweater, where she kept that machine looking thing Stan had seen when he'd first met her, so he guessed that was what she was talking about. "Nah, I got all this stuff because I figured you could make some cash selling it at the Gravity Falls Swap Meet. But let's unload what we've got now here, and then we can pick up some more to sell at the swap meet later."

"Have I mentioned lately you're a genius?" Stan asked, getting out of the car and going to grab the boxes out.

"I learned from the best," Mabel replied with a grin.

It didn't take too long to find someone who was willing to buy their stuff from them to sell for herself at her booth, offering them $15 for the lot of it. Mabel raised her eyebrows at Stan, who took the hint and haggled it up to $30. The woman didn't look too pleased about it, but she kept her end of the deal.

Stan had been a bit skeptical of the idea of going to the fair just to go to the fair. Not that Stan was against the idea of enjoying himself and having a little fun now and again, but if you could be having fun and making money at the same time, then why wouldn't you do both? And yeah, Stan had been to this kind of thing before and liked it, but that was way back before, back when he and Ford had still been a team. Maybe when Mabel had first proposed this road trip Stan had been thinking it could maybe be a replacement for the sailing voyage that he and Ford never got to go on, but that was different. The reason they hadn't gone on the voyage in the first place was because Ford had suddenly decided he was too good for that and left Stan behind, so it wasn't a big deal to find someone else to do it with instead. But doing stuff like what Stan and Ford used to do as kids together without Ford had felt off to Stan.

Once they got started though, those feelings faded away pretty quickly. Yeah, Mabel wasn't Ford, but she wasn't trying to be him either. Mabel was a crazy older sister – or at least what Stan imagined a crazy older sister would be like. Going to a fair with her wasn't any more a betrayal of Ford and the fun times he and Stan used to have together at the carnival, than Mabel going with him was a betrayal of her brother, Dipper.

In fact, the only really bad thing had nothing to do with Ford. They were walking through the stalls with stuff for sale and Mabel spotted one with a huge collection of home-spun yarn. Luckily it was apparently easier for Mabel to pick out yarn for shirts she was going to make for herself than the other had been, because they were only there for about ten minutes before she'd bought what she wanted and they moved on. Which was still about ten minutes too long for Stan, but it wasn't that terrible.

They checked out the rides next. Stan had another bad moment when he thought Mabel was going to want to go on the Ferris Wheel, but Mabel had just smiled at him and said, "Don't worry; I know better now than to try to force you to face your fears if you don't want to. Plus heights kind of bother me too now. Ooo look a spin-y ride; let's see how many times I can ride it until I puke!" Seven times, it turned out, and even then Stan thought she was forcing herself to puke because she wanted to move on, but refused to without throwing up first.

After the rides, they tackled the carnival games. Stan knew the tricks to a lot of the games, and the way to beat some of them, but Mabel knew all of them. She won prize after prize, and happily taught Stan how to do it as well. Pretty soon they were bogged down with junk all over again. Since neither of them were ready to go or wanted to be carrying all that around, they hung by the booths until they could find enough people more interested in the prizes than the games to sell all their toys for half again what they paid to win them.

They used the money they earned from doing that to try some of every single thing for sale over in the food pavilion. Stan hadn't gone hungry, and had even been eating pretty well ever since that first lunch with Mabel, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd been able to eat until he was stuffed full. It was amazing. Though he was kinda regretting letting Mabel eat as much sugar as she had, not that there had been any real chance of him being able to stop her. The best he was able to do was sit down at one of the picnic benches and refuse to move, leaving Mabel to more or less run around in circles until she burned off some of her extra energy and returned to more normal levels of crazy.

Last they wandered over to the section of the fair where people were showing off their livestock. Stan wasn't all that interested in it, but he didn't mind trailing along after Mabel and watching her coo over all the animals. She spent an especially long time looking at the pigs for some reason, before finally ending at a pen full of baby goats.

"Look how cute they all are, playing together!" Mabel said.

"They are pretty lively," Stan agreed. Most of the other animals had been asleep or at least lying down as Stan and Mabel had walked past, but the little goats were up and moving around. They were a lot more interesting to watch than the other animals had been, even if their eyes did kinda freak him out.

"Hey there folks. You all looking to buy a kid, or just looking? Either way I'd be happy to answer your questions," said a farmer who was making his way around to them from the other side of the pen.

"How much for that one?" Mabel asked, pointing to a tan goat with a few darker brown spots on him. Stan looked at her in disbelief for a moment before schooling his expression. He wasn't sure what Mabel was up to, but it had to be something – she couldn't actually be planning on buying a goat.

"Well, Cinnamon there is a buckling. If you're looking for a pet I'd recommend you look at a wether, or a doeling like Miss Daisy here," the farmer said, reaching over the fence to pat on a black and white spotted goat. "The bucklings are really best if you're intending on breeding them."

"I like that one," Mabel insisted.

The farmer shot Stan a look like he hoped Stan would talk some sense in to Mabel, but Stan looked blandly back. Finally the farmer shrugged and said, "Well, I don't like to argue with a lady. Like I said, Cinnamon is a buckling, he's a purebred Nigerian Dwarf, and he's about four-and-a-half months old. He's $75 if you want to take him home."

"If I can guess how much he weighs, can I have him for free?" Mabel asked.

The farmer gave her a strange look, and then laughed. "Like a carnival game, you mean? Alright then. It's $10 to play, then if you can guess how much he weighs you can have him for free."

"Deal," Mabel said, fishing a ten out of her pocket and passing it to the farmer. She looked at the goat, holding her hand up in front of her face, squinting, and twisting her head this way and that. Finally she put her hand back down and said, "Thirty-one-and-a-half pounds."

The farmer started at her for a minute before saying, "Now how on God's green Earth did you manage that?"

"I'm a witch," Mabel replied cheerfully.

"That so. Ah well, I keep my bargains, and you one this little one fair and square. The missus is not going to be best pleased with me." The farmer climbed into the pen, picked up Cinnamon, and handed him over to Mabel. "You folks need anything else, feed or the like?"

"Yeah, can we get, hmm… a week's worth of food and a collar and leash for him if you've got it?"

"Sure do. Let me go fetch that for you," the farmer said, walking off.

Once he was out of earshot, Stan turned to Mabel and said, "Don't tell me fairy magic can tell you the weight of goats." He was starting to get a feeling like Mabel wasn't exactly up to anything after all.

"Nah, I just have a gift. I won my pet pig Waddles the same way," Mabel told him.

"And something tells me you ain't planning on selling that goat at the Gravity Falls Swap Meet neither."

"We can't sell Gompers," Mabel said, hugging the goat tighter. Yeah, Stan was afraid of that.

"Gompers?" Stan repeated. He supposed it was better than Cinnamon, but not by much.

"You're right, that's crazy; no way goats live that long. I'll call him Gompers the First instead."

"You're planning on owning multiple goats named Gompers."

"Oh Gompers isn't _my_ goat; I got him for you," Mabel said, and suddenly Stan found himself with an armful of baby goat. "Happy… July 26th! Whatever, it's not like I need a reason to get you a present anyway."

Stan just stood there for a minute in total shock. For some reason the one thing that kept running through his head was Pa's voice saying, "What, spend all that money getting you a dog that I'm going to have to take care of when you can't live up to you responsibilities anymore? Keep on dreaming, buster." Then the goat started chewing on Stan's shirt, which snapped him right out of it.

"You got me a goat? What am I supposed to do with a goat? Crazy thing is probably just going to eat all my stuff. And it's got demon eyes."

" _What?_ " Mabel screeched. She darted around and grabbed the goat's face to force it to look her in the eye – which also forced the thing to stop chewing on Stan's shirt, thank Moses. She started at it for a few moments, then let out a sigh of relief. "Okay, I see how you got confused, but no he's clean. The slits are horizontal, not vertical." Well that was ominous. On second thought, Stan didn't want to know.

"Even if he's not a literal demon, that doesn't answer the question of what you expect me to do with a goat. I don't know if you noticed, but I'm living out of my car. Not the best place to try and keep a pet."

"Right now you are, but once we get to Prince Charming's place, Gompers will have all kinds of space to rum around. He's going to love it, aren't you Gompers? But you'll have to earn your keep by helping to keep the gnomes away, alright boy?" Mabel said, petting Gompers.

"Gnomes?"

"Yeah, there's a whole kingdom of them up in the woods in Gravity Falls. Queendom. They can be pretty scary when they're hunting down a new queen, but other than that they're just pests. They'll sneak into your kitchen when you're not looking and steal all your food – it's impossible to keep jam in stock once you get infested with gnomes. But they'll usually steer clear if there's a goat hanging around, because goats will nab the hats right off their heads and eat them."

"You're crazy, you know that?" Stan said.

"I sure am," Mabel replied.

Just then Gompers pulled away from her, turning his head to rest it on Stan's shoulder. Gompers shut his eyes, sighed heavily, and then, to all appearances, fell asleep. "Aww, look, he loves you already," Mabel cooed.

Well, Stan supposed he could keep the goat for a little while. Until they got to Gravity Falls, anyway.


	6. Chapter 6

So, looking back on it, maybe coming back to Salt Lake City hadn't been the best idea. Yeah, sure Stan had made it out of Utah once before without being banned, but Utah was also the first place where he'd been thrown in jail – he'd still been riding on a Vegas high and the whole state of Utah was just swarming with Mormons who wouldn't let a guy get away with nothing – so obviously the place had it in for him. Not to mention going back anywhere was always a risk for him, since he tended to leave more enemies behind than friends.

Here was the thing: all week long now Mabel had kept finding fun places for them to stop at and pull pranks and make tons of money by not technically conning people. Even the places that she had wanted to stop at that Stan had been sure were going to end up being stupid were still worth the visit. Seriously, who besides Mabel would have ever thought the Paperclip Museum would be anything like a good idea? Yet Stan had ended up having a better time there than he had at most of the other places he'd been in the last five years. Mabel was apparently full of good ideas.

Stan wasn't trying to get down on himself or anything here. He knew that he played a part in everything and that Mabel was having more fun with him there than she would have had by herself – dynamic duo was always better than being alone. It was just at least once Stan wanted to be the one to suggest something good. He wanted to feel like he was contributing, you know? So when they had just happened to be driving by Salt Lake City and it had just happened Tuesday and Stan had just happened to remember he always used to have to clear out of his favorite bar out this way on Tuesdays because that's when they had their stupid gimmick night – the exact kind of gimmick Mabel would be all over – he had figured it was a sign.

He had told Mabel that he was taking her some place he knew because he had a surprise for her. She had literally screamed with delight, and then she had screamed again even louder when they got to the place and saw they were doing an open mike night, just like Stan remembered. Stan had grinned to himself then as she went chattering on about Love Patrol Alpha and grand reunion tours; no riding on anyone's coattails for him, not anymore. Granted he had stopped grinning when he had realized that Mabel expected him to sing with her, but he had managed to get out of there at the end of the night having only sung one song, which he was going to count as a win.

The trouble hadn't come until after that, when Mabel had insisted they take Gompers for a walk before crashing for the night. He should have been keeping an eye out, should have known better than to let his guard down, especially when he was somewhere where he knew he'd left behind people that didn't like him – granted that was pretty much everywhere he'd been at this point. But Stan had been full and pleasantly buzzed and happy and the only person he'd pissed off that evening was the guy at the end of the bar that had kept shooting him the stink-eye because, Stan was pretty sure, he had thought that Stan was Mabel's date and he was jealous. He shouldn't have, but Stan had let himself relax and walk and talk with Mabel and believe that getting up to sing in front of a bar full of people was the worst thing that was going to happen to him tonight.

The stupidest thing about all this – besides the normal Stan Pines stupidity – was it was freaking Alan. If you had asked Stan to make a top ten list of the people he wouldn't want to into again in a dark alley in the middle of the night, then not only would Alan not have made the list, Stan wouldn't have even considered him for it for a second. The guy's name was Alan for cripes sake, that sounded like the name of a sweater vest-wearing accountant. It definitely didn't sound like the name of the kind of guy that would ambush a guy in the middle of the night, grab his friend and drag her down a dark alley with a knife to her throat because he wanted the money he was owed. Yet here they were, Mabel with a knife to her throat and Stan with nothing to defend her with but his wits – ha! – and a goat.

"You shouldn't have come back here, Hal," Alan said, and right, Hal Forrester, that was the name Stan'd been going by when he'd been back this way.

"Hey, hey, why don't we all just calm down, take a breath. You can let her go and we'll discuss this like reasonable people," Stan said. It was amazing that he kept his voice so even when it felt like his heart was about to break out of his chest because Mabel had _a knife to her throat_. Years of practice he guessed.

"Oh, I'm very calm, and I'm not letting your little girlfriend here go until I get what you owe me, plus some extra for my trouble," Alan said.

"Can I just say two things?" Mabel asked, her voice a bit flat as she tried to minimize the movement of her throat.

"Sure sweetie. But I don't think you need to beg him to save you; it's pretty clear he's already desperate," Alan said. Yeah Stan was desperate, but he had kind of been hoping Alan hadn't realized that – Stan had too little control over the situation as it was. Alan did pull the knife a little further away from Mabel's throat to let her speak, so there was that at least.

"Okay first off, I am not his girlfriend; we're family and I wish people would stop saying gross things. Secondly…" Mabel got a manic glint in her eyes just then, a manic glint Stan recognized. Either Stan and Mabel were both about to die horribly when whatever she was about to pull went horribly wrong, or – and Stan's money was on this option – Alan was about to get his balls cheerfully cut off.

"GRAPPLING HOOK!" Mabel screamed. Her right arm, which had crossed over to her left hip at some point without either Stan or Alan noticing, whipped across her body, aiming the grappling hook she was holding at the fire escape on the building across from her. She went flying up out of Alan's hold, through the air, and landed neatly on the ground behind Stan. Mabel turned around to face him and Alan again and concluded with a pleasant smile. "And don't call me sweetie. Sorry, three things."

"What the hell just happened?" Alan said.

"Where did you get a grappling hook?" Stan asked.

"I've had it the whole time," Mabel said nonchalantly as she put it back in the holster on her hip and covered it with her sweater. "The only souvenir I'll ever need."

"How did I not notice that?" Stan said.

"You'd be surprised by how many people don't notice. I literally have this baby within reach at all times, and hardly anyone ever says anything about it," Mabel replied.

"What. The hell. Just happened?" Alan repeated, still looking a bit in shock. Stan would sympathize with the guy if he didn't hate him so much for the stunt he just pulled – meeting Mabel for the first time was a bit like getting hit by a hurricane in a fluorescent sweater.

"What happened is you underestimated me and I took advantage of that to – Gompers, no!" Mabel broke off mid-sentence to dart over to the goat, which had apparently picked something up off the ground to chew on. Mabel pulled it out of his mouth, allowing the other two to see what it was

"My knife!" Alan exclaimed. He must've dropped it when Mabel shot out of his arms and then been too distracted by the whole grappling hook thing to think to pick it back up.

"It was your knife, but you dropped it and our goat picked it up, so it's mine now," Mabel said. Gompers bleated up at her piteously a few times, and Mabel shook a finger at him. "No Gompers. Knives are not for chewing on. We'll get you some food when we get back to the car."

Gompers bleated at her a bit more, the when she refused to give him the knife back, he walked back over to Stan and head-butted him. Stan scratched the kid on the head some, hoping that would calm him down – Gompers loved getting scratched. "I thought you said you never stole," Stan said, indicating the knife.

"Almost never, and this isn't stealing anyway. This is spoils of war. This guy wrongfully attacked us, and we won the encounter, and now we get our loot," Mabel said. She sounded like one of Ford's nerd games, but before Stan could tell her as much Alan interrupted, and Stan didn't even know what he was still doing here anyway. He'd lost the element of surprise, lost his hostage, and lost his knife to Mabel who was now twirling it expertly and absent-mindedly between her fingers. Really, Alan should be taking advantage of Stan and Mabel's distraction to get while the getting was good.

"I don't know what Hal's been telling you, but I wasn't wrongfully attacking anyone. He's the one that borrowed money from me with no intention of ever paying me back and then skipped town when I caught on."

Mabel stilled her grip on the knife then turned to Stan with her arms crossed. "Is this true?"

"I mean, if you want to get real technical…"

"Stanley Filbert Pines!"

"That ain't my name," Stan said mulishly. In part because Alan still thought his name was Hal Forrester, and Stan wanted to keep it that way, and in part because that really wasn't his middle name.

"It is now," Mabel said, and Stan was smart enough not to argue. Mabel had probably gotten it wrong on purpose anyway, and no prizes for guessing why she wouldn't like his actual middle name.

"Okay, yeah maybe I borrowed some money from him and maybe I didn't pay him back, but it ain't exactly like I've been flush with cash the past coupla years. And I skipped town because I had to get the heck outta dodge before I got banned from another state," Stan said. Forget older sister, this was like getting stared down by Ma, and Stan had never been able to resist cracking when Ma got serious.

That explanation softened Mabel's expression up to stern but understanding, and Stan figured he was pretty much off the hook. She turned to Alan and asked, "How much does Stan owe you?"

"Seventy-five dollars," Alan said.

"I'm sorry, I just hallucinated. I thought you said you were threatening to kill me over _seventy-five dollars_ ," said Mabel.

Alan flinched away, and Stan did not blame him. "I wasn't going to kill you. I was just trying to scare you a bit. I'm not an idiot; I know this worthless sack doesn't have the money to pay me back. I saw the two of you in the bar, and he's pretty obviously wrapped around your finger. So I figured if I made him think you might be in trouble, he might get his stupid act together and get me my money back."

"I see." Mabel's voice went deathly calm for a moment before going back to that cheerful yet terrifying place it went sometimes. "Well, you're right about Stan here being a big marshmallow softie and about how he would do anything to keep me safe. He would die for me just like I would die for him, and those are objective facts. He would also take on a horde of zombies armed with nothing but a pair of knuckle dusters, and what you really need to be worried about right now is that I have half a mind to take Gompers and leave you here alone with the man capable of punching a literal demon into oblivion."

Alan's eyes darted back and forth between Mabel and Stan a few times before he drew himself up and said with a sneer, "I'm not scared of this moron."

It wasn't false bravado, or at least not mostly. Alan definitely wasn't scared of Stan which, given that Stan was sure he could take the guy in a fair fight easily, meant Alan was either packing something besides the knife Mabel was still holding or the guy was an idiot. Possibly both. Probably both. No, Alan wasn't scared of Stan, but Stan knew who he was scared of.

"Mabel, don't I remember you offering to punch anyone who ever made me feel like I was worthless?" Stan said, shooting Alan a smug grin.

"You're right, I did promise that I'd do that! And this guy called you worthless to your face," Mabel said. "Maybe I should let you take Gompers back to the car and catch up with you in a bit."

"Whoa, wait a second," Alan said. "Why don't we all just take a minute and calm down-"

"Oh, I'm very calm," said. Mabel, echoing Alan's earlier words. "But if you need a minute, go ahead. I suggest you take the time to think very carefully about what I want to hear from you before I send Stan on his way so you and I can have a little chat one-on-one." Mabel tossed the knife up, letting it flip a few times in the air before neatly catching it and grinning hugely at Alan.

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry I called your brother or whatever worthless," Alan said.

"Don't apologize to me, apologize to Stan," Mabel said, pointing the knife in his direction.

"I'm sorry I called you worthless, Hal, um, Stan."

"And?" Mabel prompted.

"And I'm sorry I threatened your sister with a knife."

"And?"

"And I won't tell anybody I saw you in town."

"And?"

"… And you don't have to pay me back."

"And you promise never to do anything like this again," said Mabel.

"Yes, yes I promise," Alan said. "Just stop throwing that thing around."

"What this? Sure," Mabel said, nonchalantly tucking the knife into her belt next to her grappling hook holster. "And apology accepted! Now, as for the money Stan owes you..."

Next thing Stan knew, Mabel was holding his wallet flipping through his cash. "Hey!" he objected instinctively checking his back pocket, even though he knew he wasn't going to find anything there. "What are you doing?"

"Paying this guy back the money you owe him," Mabel said calmly, pulling out a couple of bills before reaching over and tucking the wallet back into Stan's pocket.

"He just threatened to kill you!" Stan said.

"Which is wrong, but not paying someone back the money you owe them is also wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right; three lefts do." Now Mabel was pulling money out of her own pocket and adding it to the pile.

"But he just said I didn't have to pay him back."

"He only said that because he was scared and thought it was what I wanted to hear. But it wasn't, so I'm not going to hold him to it." She handed the stack over to Alan who, looking dazed, took it. "There you are. That's the seventy-five Stan owes you, plus a little extra from me to pay you back for the knife I'm taking. I know you promised not to do anything like this again, but sometimes promises take a little while to settle in, so I don't want to tempt you."

"Who are you?" Alan asked, unable to tear his eyes away from Mabel's face.

"Oh, silly me!" She stuck her hand out. "I'm Mabel. Nice to meet you."

"…Alan." He took her hand, and Mabel gave three vigorous shakes so enthusiastic it pumped Alan's whole arm up and down before letting go.

"Okay, well Stan and I have to go now; it's past Gompers' bedtime. Have a nice night Alan, and don't get yourself into any more trouble." Mabel linked her arm in Stan's and walked them off into the night as casual as you please, leaving Alan behind still lost in shock. What did Stan say: like a hurricane in a fluorescent sweater.

After they'd gone a couple blocks, Stan found his voice to ask about something Mabel said that was bothering him. "Those things you said to Alan, about me beating up the zombies and the literal demon, those were oddly specific examples."

"They sure were specific," Mabel agreed. Stan guessed she had a point – almost everything Mabel said was odd, so really the odd thing would have been if she hadn't made up odd and specific examples.

"Okay, and then there's the other thing you said. You know, about us dying for each other…"

"Oh sorry, I didn't mean to freak you out or anything. I'm not expecting you to go out and die for me anytime soon," Mabel reassured him. "I just meant there's a version of you – one who met me more than a week ago and knows who I am – that would die for me. That's all."

"I was actually talking about the other part of that." The part where Mabel was apparently willing to die for Stan. Yeah, he knew she liked him, and she kept saying that she loved him, but she threw that word around a lot in general, so Stan was trying not to read too much into it. Better to not get his hopes up in the first place. But here she was saying she would _die_ for him, and saying it like it was obvious. The sky is blue, water is wet, and Mabel would die for Stan. It was… well it was something, that's for sure.

"Of course I would be willing to die if it meant keeping you safe and happy," Mabel said. That was a bit much to take in on its own, but then she added, "I mean, I kind of already am."

For a second, Stan wanted to believe it was a joke, some kind of crack about Alan threatening her a minute ago, but Stan had gotten pretty good at telling when Mabel was joking, and this time she wasn't. Mabel was actually dying. Mabel _was dying._ What, did she have some kind of disease that she should be in the hospital for right now instead of driving across the country with him? Did fairies get poisoned if they stayed away from fairyland for too long? What was wrong with her? Better question: how could Stan fix it?

"Possibly I shouldn't have said that. Don't freak out, okay? If I was going to vanish in a puff of paradox-induced smoke I figure it probably would have happened already. Probably. I'm almost certainly not going to die… I just might have a little trouble getting back home again at the end of this," Mabel said.

Stan didn't know where Mabel's home was – in fairyland or back in Jersey or Chicago or somewhere else altogether – but he knew a lot about what it was like. Mabel was always talking about her brother and all the crazy adventures the two of them had been on over the years and about her two uncles who apparently owned a boat and sailed it all around the world together, and Stan had never actually choked on jealousy before, and about her parents and nieces and nephews and more friends than Stan could even begin to keep track of. "Look, why don't you go ahead and head back home now while you can. I promise I'll go on to Gravity Falls and meet this Prince Charming or whatever, you just need to get back." Stan wasn't worth giving up all that for.

"You wipe that look off your face right now, mister," Mabel said, pointing an accusatory finger at Stan. "This is my choice I made all on my own with a full understanding of what could happen, more or less. You don't get to feel guilty about it. Especially because if I could go back and do it all over again I would still make the same choice. I'm taking you to Gravity Falls and to your Prince Charming because that's what I want to do. I want to help you and I'm _happy_ to help you, no matter what that means for me."

Stan didn't know what to say to that. It was a lot, too much. He opened his mouth and shut it again a couple of times, trying to figure out how to respond. Finally, after way too many false starts, he said, "So you know back earlier, when Alan had you and I somehow actually thought someone holding a knife to your throat was going to be dangerous for you. I was thinking, well I was mostly thinking that coming back to Salt Lake City was a bad idea, but also I was thinking that I wished it was me Alan had grabbed. I wished it was me with the knife to his throat instead of you."

Mabel threw both arms around Stan, tripping over Gompers' leash in the process, but Stan managed to catch her before she fell. She hugged him tight and said, "I love you too."


	7. Chapter 7

Stan opened the bathroom door, and steam spilled out into the room like a London fog. So maybe he had overdone the shower a bit, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd taken a hot shower. Not just a hot shower, but one with soap and shampoo and conditioner – real stuff, not the cheap little bottles places like this sometimes gave you for free. Then there was the razor and shaving cream and the toothbrush and toothpaste and the new clothes without any holes or mysterious stains to change into, and a fresh stick of deodorant for tomorrow morning. Normally Stan wouldn't have wasted money on any of that kind of stuff, much less on a nice hotel room – well, not fancy nice, but he had yet to see a rat or roach or any other nasty crawling thing, so it was nice as far as he was concerned – but Mabel had insisted. Stan was even beginning to think he could see her point about it being easier to feel your best when you looked your best, but that might have been the hour-long shower – a whole freaking hour and he still hadn't run out of hot water – talking.

Mabel wolf-whistled. "Hunkle Stan has entered the building."

"Hunkle?" Stan repeated, but he was already preening under the attention. He didn't have to know what the word meant to know it was a good thing.

"Yeah, you know, like hunk, but hunkle… It probably makes more sense in context." So did most of the things Mabel said. Stan tried not to worry about it.

"I do clean up pretty good," Stan said, passing a hand through his freshly cut hair. Another thing Mabel had insisted on, and Stan had to admit it did look better now that it was all neat and even, though he had insisted on keeping the mullet. "We're going to knock 'em dead in Gravity Falls tomorrow."

"Yeah, we are. Not that Prince Charming is going to care what you look like," Mabel rushed to assure him for about the seventh time today. "He's just going to happy to see you. Maybe not right away, but he'll get there even if it takes him a minute." Her expression made it clear she had no problems forcing him to get there if he didn't on his own. Stan almost felt bad for the guy.

"Honestly, I ain't worried about that." If anything, it was the one good argument against getting himself all gussied up. Stan might not have a problem with what people got up to behind closed doors, but that didn't mean he wanted any guys out there getting ideas about getting up to it with him.

Mabel gave him an odd, considering look for a long moment before smiling again. "Good. You shouldn't be. Okay, my turn for the shower." She jumped up off the bed and grabbed an armful of stuff from the bedside table before bouncing off to the bathroom.

Stan settled himself on the other bed and within ten seconds had Gompers standing there bleating up at him. He hauled the goat up on top of the covers and began scratching Gompers absent-mindedly while flicking through the handful of local channels on the little TV. Stan had been skeptical about trying to bring a goat into a hotel room, but Mabel had claimed to have done multiple times with a fully-grown pig and that after that, sneaking a little kid in would be no problem. To her credit, if sneaking Gompers out went as smoothly as sneaking him in had gone, she'd be absolutely right.

Mabel didn't take nearly as long in the bathroom as Stan, and pretty soon she was climbing right back into her bed and snuggling down. Stan turned off the TV and the lamp as soon as she had and climbed under the covers himself. It wasn't that late yet, but Mabel wanted them to get started first thing in the morning so they could drive the last hour to Gravity Falls and still get there early. That was the other reason why they had decided to put up for the night here in Bend instead of pressing on, and it's not like Stan had any problems with stretching their trip out just a little longer.

"Hey Stan?" Mabel said into the still, dark air.

"Yeah?" Stan said.

"You know I love you, right?"

"Yeah, yeah," Stan said dismissively, trying to cover for the warmth in his chest.

"Seriously Stan. You know I love you so, so much, right?"

"Yeah, I know. I, uh… Iloveyoutoo." Okay, so, Stan had said it. He'd been thinking it for a while now, ever since Mabel had revealed she might be dying just so she could make Stan happy, but he hadn't said it yet. It's wasn't like he had thought she'd take it badly or would make fun of him or something, because that would be crazy, right? She said she loved him all the time, no way she'd get upset at him for saying it back. It was just, it was a hard thing to just say straight out like that, and Stan hadn't said it to anyone in… well, in a long time.

"Staaan," Mabel said, and he was pretty sure them both being in separate beds right now was the only thing saving him from being jumped and hugged within an inch of his life right now. "I really love you so much. And you know I would never do anything to hurt you and if I did, it would be on accident. Or because I care about you, and I know you need it."

Stan had stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop with Mabel a long time ago – possibly from the word go, not that you'd ever get him to admit to that. If anyone else had said to him what Mabel just had, especially after what Stan had just said to her, it would be setting off all kinds of red flags. Heck, Stan would probably already be heading for the hills if it were anyone else. But since it was Mabel… well, Stan just really hoped he wasn't wrong about her.

"Stan?" Mabel prompted when he didn't answer right away.

"Yeah, I, uh," Stan licked his lips, "I guess I know that too."

"Good," Mabel said. There was a moment that seemed to stretch out forever as Stan waited for what she would say next. "I want you to tell me about the science fair."

Okay, well that definitely wasn't the kind of gut punch Stan had been expecting. Still a gut punch though. "What do you want to know about that for? It's ancient history," he said, sounding spectacularly unconvincing.

"Four and a half years isn't ancient history; it isn't even regular history. Anyway, I didn't say I wanted to know about it, because I already know all about it. I said I want you to tell me about it."

"What do you need me to tell you for if you already know?"

"I don't need you to tell me, you need you to tell me. You need to talk about it."

"It's a classic case of Stanley Pines being an idiot and screwing everything up again. Nothing to talk about," Stan said.

"Stop it. You're not an idiot, and you don't screw everything up, and there is a lot to talk about. A lot of stuff came at you all at once, and I know you haven't talked to anyone about it, and I don't think you even know how you feel about it."

He felt terrible about it; he didn't see any need to dig into the nuances of it. "What does it matter? Talking about it ain't going to change anything. Talking about it's not going to make me millions of dollars, and it's not going to change Pa's mind about me, and it's definitely not… not going to make Ford stop hating me." There was something else Stan hadn't said out loud before. He knew it was true, but he hadn't wanted to admit it, not even to himself. He could admit it to Mabel, though.

There was a rustling sound from the other bed, and all the sudden Stan's covers were being thrown back to make room for Mabel. "What are you doing?" Stan asked.

"Well I can't hug you from all the way over there," Mabel said, like it was reasonable excuse for climbing into someone else's bed with them. To be fair, in her mind it probably was. That's why he was willing to admit the truth about Ford hating him to her. Mabel wrapped her arms around him and pulled him close. "Ford doesn't hate you."

"You didn't see the look on his face after Pa kicked me out. He _hates_ me. My own twin brother hates me because I screw everything up."

"Shhhh, everything will be alright," Mabel said, stroking his hair. "I promise I'm going to fix it. Tell me about the science fair."

Mabel was right that he'd never talked to anybody about it, and he had had every intention of going the rest of his life without ever doing so. The only people it concerned were him and Ford, and since Ford was probably never going to want to talk to him again, Stan hadn't seen any reason to bring it up. But here in the dark and the quiet, with Mabel with her arms around him on one side and with the warm press of Gompers on the other, it felt like it might be okay to let the words out.

"The school was having a science fair. They had one every year and me and Ford always entered. Ford because he liked all that nerdy science stuff and me because, well I had to do something while Ford was working on his project. Besides, I pretty much always needed the extra credit."

"That sounds like a fun thing for you and your brother to do together," Mabel said encouragingly.

"Yeah, it really was. I mean Ford's projects were always a lot more brain-y than mine, but we still had fun competing who had the cooler idea or whose presentation was better, stuff like that. There was also a couple of times when we were kids when we did one project together," Stan said.

"You never told me that before," Mabel said, and she almost sounded accusatory, but it's not like it had ever come up before. "Please tell me you have pictures."

"Not on me, but Ma probably has some in the family photo albums," said Stan.

"Photo album _s_? As in there are multiple albums full of pictures of adorable little Stan twins lying around somewhere? I am going to make so many scrapbooks."

The room was too dark for him to see Mabel's face very well, but he didn't need to to know she had that far away dreamy expression on her face she got sometimes. Stan gave her a minute, but when it didn't look like she was going to come out of it on her own he cleared his throat. "Mabel?"

"Right, you were telling me about the science fair," she said, shaking her head a little. "Go on."

"Senior year, Ford's project brilliant. I mean, they were always brilliant 'cause Ford's a genius, but senior year's was extra brilliant. He made a perpetual motion machine, and even I know that's supposed to be some kind of impossible science thing, but Ford only ever cared about impossible for the challenge. My brother's crazy like that."

"I know the feeling," Mabel said. She knew the feeling? Heck, Mabel was the feeling, distilled down and concentrated until she didn't even care about impossible anymore. Stan was pretty sure she just decided how she wanted things to work out and the rest of the world fell in line.

"Ford got first place again that year, and I got my extra credit, and everything was good. That was Friday morning. That afternoon we got called to the principal's office. Only in turned out they didn't want me, just Ford, so I had to sit outside the door where I could still everything they were saying anyway. Ma and Pa were there too and the principal told them all about this fancy school that was sending representatives down to check out Ford's project and maybe give him a scholarship. West Coast Tech, I don't know if you've heard of it."

"Oh, I've heard of them. Those jerks," Mabel said.

"Why don't you like them? Yeah, I hate that college, but my reasons are pretty personal," Stan said.

"And so are mine," Mabel said, which, eh, fair enough. "So what happened when Ford talked to you about it after?"

"Ford and my plan for after high school had always been to go international treasure hunting on the Stan O' War, and he'd never said anything to me like he didn't want to do it anymore. Still, even if I'm not a genius, I'm not a complete idiot either; I knew that nerd school was right up his alley. There was no way he wasn't going to want to go. I got so mad at that dumb college and his dumb project, trying to tear my brother away from me."

"Mmmmm," Mabel said.

"Mmmmm? What mmmmm?"

"I was thinking, you know Dipper was offered an opportunity to go study somewhere far away once too. Not across the country far, but still an eight hour drive away. He was going to take it and I remember I got so mad… at him."

"Why would Ford just abandon me like that?" Stan exclaimed, flushed with anger all over again. "You know what he told me? He told me that if the college wasn't impressed with his project – like there was a chance of that – then we could go sailing. Like our life-long dream was some kind of consolation prize. What kind of person does that to their twin?"

"The kind that needs their twin to give them a bop on the head and say 'Hey, I love you. Please don't leave me behind,'" said Mabel.

"Why should I have to say that? I would never leave Ford behind. Not that I could, but, you know, if I could, I wouldn't; he wouldn't have to ask."

"Stan, let me tell you a secret about Dipper and Ford. Those two geniuses are a pair of idiots," Mabel said. Stan gave a snort of disbelief, amused agreement, something like that. "When they get lost in their science-y stuff they get so focused they forget about things like eating and sleeping and the potential emotional impact of the things they do on the people around them. That's what we're there for, to remind them to think with their hearts and their brains, just like Dipper's there to tell me when I'm being a selfish, impulsive brat."

"You're not a brat," Stan said.

"Not all the time, no. But when Dipper was thinking about taking that opportunity I mentioned, I threw I tantrum, made a deal to freeze time so he couldn't leave me behind, only to find out I had actually accidentally jump-started the apocalypse, then locked myself in a bubble and refused to come out until Dipper came and apologized for acting like an idiot."

"Well, that's, uh… something," Stan said, trying to wrap his head around that one. "Was that that apocalypse you mentioned that only lasted a couple of days?"

"Yeah, we've only had the one so far. Fingers crossed," Mabel said, which was not exactly an encouraging thought. "The point is, nobody's all perfect all the time. Not me, not you, and not Ford. He probably didn't even realize you felt like he was leaving you behind."

"Maybe," Stan said. He guessed she could be right; it certainly sounded like something Ford would do, getting so caught up with his nerd college and their fancy science programs he didn't realize he was crushing Stan's dream. Stan wasn't sure that made things any better though. Because if Ford hadn't started it by deliberately leaving Stan in the dust, if he had been just being an idiot and hurting Stan was only a misunderstanding or an accident or whatever, then what was Stan's excuse?

"So Ford said he wanted to go to West Coast Tech, and you got mad. Then what?"

"Ford left, went back home I guess, and I decided to go for a walk to clear my head. Somehow I ended up at the high school. The science fair was set up in the cafeteria, and the lock on the back door there never worked right – heck it's probably still broken. I went in and suddenly there it was right in front of me: Ford's project, the thing that was going to take my brother away from me. I was so mad, I slammed my fist down on the table. That must have jostled the machine because this little piece popped off. But I stuck it right back on, and the machine was still going when I left, I swear. I never meant to break it."

"Of course you didn't," Mabel said. Like it was easy, like it was obvious, like everyone ought to know that Stan would never do something like that to his brother on purpose no matter how mad he was. It should have been obvious; Ford was Stan's best friend, his other half, the most important person in the entire world to Stan, and if Ford wanted to go to a college on the other side of the country and leave Stan scraping barnacles in Glass Shard Beach, then no matter how much Stan hated it, he would still be proud of Ford and happy for him too. He wanted Ford to be happy; he just also wanted Ford to want them to be happy together.

"Stan?" Mabel said, and Stan realized he hadn't actually said anything back for a coupla minutes.

"It's fine; I'm fine," Stan said, screwing his eyes shut and clenching his fist.

Mabel made a noise like she didn't believe him, and he couldn't say he blamed her, but he was fine. Life kept trying to knock him down, but he'd picked himself up and dusted himself off a thousand times before, and he'd do it a million times more if he had to. He was fine.

"Hey, I'm going to tell you something really important, something that it took me a long time to learn," Mabel said. "I mean, I always knew it in my head, but it took me a long time to really feel it and believe it, you know? Stan, it's okay to not be okay."

"For you maybe; you got a brother that actually cares about you and parents and your uncles and all the rest of your family and friends and all that looking out for you. But that attitude doesn't do you any good when you're living on the streets," Stan said.

"Stanley." Mabel's voice broke, and she pulled him in so close she was practically crushing him. "I care about you. I love you so, so much. And I love it when you're happy and on top of the world and just excited to be alive, but I also love you when you're sad. I love you when you're mad, when you're grumpy, when you're trying to pretend like you're too bitter to care even though you really do. And sometimes you look at me and for a minute or two you have no idea who I am, and I _hate_ it, but I still love you.

"I'm so glad that you can take whatever punches life throws at you and keep coming back for more, because I don't know where you'd be or what would have happened to you if you couldn't. I don't know where I'd be, or who I'd be if I didn't have you. But sometimes when life knocks you down it _hurts_ , and if you need to just sit on the ground and be hurt for a while, that's okay. I'll sit down in the dirt right next to you and hug you until you feel better. You're not alone anymore. I'm here."

If you asked Stan later, he'd say that Mabel had started crying first, which was mostly true, so it was her fault when he started crying too, which wasn't. The truth was, he'd been waiting four and a half years, since the moment Pa had kicked him out, since the moment Stan had looked up at Ford in the window, and Ford had closed the curtains on him, for someone to say that to him. He had wanted it to be Ford, more than anything in the world he wanted it to be Ford, but if it was Mabel instead, then that was enough. Stan just needed somebody. He just wanted to go home.

A long time later, after the sobs wracking Stan's body had subsided into scattered sniffles, and as Stan was drifting off into exhaustion, he said, "This Gravity Falls and Prince Charming stuff; you said you were taking me home, right?"

He fell asleep before he could hear Mabel's reply. "Yeah Grunkle Stan, we're going home."


	8. Chapter 8

Stan woke up the next morning with Mabel sprawled out across his bed right on top of him, with Gompers snoring almost directly in his ear, and feeling better than he had for a long time. Well, maybe not better, exactly, but lighter, freer. The weight of the biggest mistake of his life was still weighing down on him, but not as heavily as it had yesterday. That feeling stayed with him through getting up, getting dressed, checking out of the hotel, loading up in the car, and the first fifty-seven minutes of their drive. Then they passed a big billboard reading "Welcome to Gravity Falls".

Stan knew by now Mabel wasn't planning on ditching him at this Prince Charming's doorstep and doing a runner on him as soon as they got there. She was going to see this thing through to the end, whatever that ended up being. Still, he also knew she wasn't going to be around forever. She had to go home eventually – or try to go home, but Stan refused to believe she wasn't going to make it if for no other reason than he refused to be responsible for ruining the lives of both of the most important people to him. Getting to Gravity Falls meant they were one step closer to Mabel leaving, and Stan didn't want her to go.

Then there was the other thing. The Prince Charming thing. Stan wasn't interested in having any kind of romance with the guy, or any guy, but he was open to making friends. Mabel was working out great as a partner in crime, and if she thought Prince Charming would be a good fit for the role when she was gone, Stan trusted her. Or, well he wanted to trust her, but he was starting to wonder if she'd ever even met this guy before. The guy definitely didn't know they were coming. And what, some guy back in some backwoods town up in Oregon was supposed to somehow be Stan's perfect match and best friend for life? Stan had let himself get dragged into Mabel's world of fantasy, bit by bit, but that was still a little too fairy tale for him.

Oh hey look, a gas station. That was the perfect opportunity to do one of the things that Stan did best: stall like crazy and hope his problems went away on their own.

"What are you doing?" Mabel demanded as Stan pulled into the station.

"Getting gas. We're running low." A quarter of a tank was low, relatively speaking.

"What? No! We have to go to Prince Charming's first thing, right away, before we go anywhere else."

Stan gave her a look as he pulled up to the pump. She was really freaking out over this for some reason. "I'm just getting gas. It'll take five minutes." Five minutes he could stretch out into ten or fifteen by going in the convenience store and dragging his feet looking at the snacks. Then when he didn't see anything he felt like eating, he could ask about the local diner – small towns like this always had some kind of diner – and suggest he and Mabel go get breakfast and waste another forty-five minute on that, an hour and a half if he managed to get into enough inane conversations with the locals.

"You're right, it's nothing. I mean I fixed it, there's no way that's going to happen again. Oh, but _that_ could definitely happen, and it could ruin everything." Mabel flung her door open and jumped out of the car. "Stay here, and don't talk to anyone." She slammed the door shut and ran up to gas jockey, presumably to intercept him before he could try to talk to Stan.

Stan had his hand on the car handle and pulled it halfway before sighing and letting it go. He had no idea what had gotten into Mabel, but she had been right about pretty much everything so far. He could wait until she had a chance to explain why she didn't want him talking to anyone before he decided not to listen to her.

"What the hell was that all about?" Stan asked as soon as she got back into the car. He would give her a chance to explain, but that didn't mean he had to be happy about it.

"Yeah, that, ha ha," Mabel said. "Funny thing about that. It's really important that you don't talk to anyone here in town until after you see Prince Charming. And, you know, it would probably be best if the first time you meet everyone, you come to town with Prince Charming. Just in case."

Stan pulled up to a red light, and used the opportunity to look Mabel full in the face and stare incredulously. "That is one of the ominous-sounding things you've said yet, and you regularly talk about demons and the apocalypse."

"Not like that," Mabel said. "Gravity Falls is weird, but it's not creepy. Okay it's creepy sometimes, but not Children of the Corn style creepy; there aren't any cultist running around or anything. Well, probably not. There definitely aren't any memory-wiping cultist running around, I know that for a fact."

"Nothing you just said makes it better," Stan told her.

"Look, I promise it's not a creepy thing this time. Oh, turn here," Mabel said, pointing to an upcoming T-intersection for Gopher Road. "It'll all make sense after we get to Prince Charming's house, which is just down this road a little ways now, okay? Trust me."

What else was Stan supposed to say to that but, "Okay, I trust you."

A little ways down the road turned out to actually be a long ways down the road because apparently not only did Prince Charming live in a backwoods little town, he lived in the back woods of a backwoods little town. Finally Mabel had him turn off in front of a cabin with a number of radio antennas sticking off of it and a big satellite dish out front, which really wasn't helping the whole creepy vibe. At least the place wasn't ramshackle and boarded up or anything. If anything, it looked like it had only been built within the last year or so.

Mabel jumped out of the car as soon as Stan had pulled to a stop before opening the back door to pull Gompers out. "Run free and explore your new home, boy!"

Stan got out himself and then leaned against the hood of the car giving Mabel a serious look. "Before we go up there and knock on Prince Charming's door, there's one thing I want to make sure you understand. I got no problems with meeting this guy and seeing if we get along, but I'm not queer and I don't have any interest in riding off into the sunset and getting married to him or whatever the equivalent of that is for gay guys."

"Ewww, Stan! Why do you keep saying gross things?" Mabel exclaimed. "Of course you guys aren't going to have a romantic relationship. He's your platonic Prince Charming, platonic. Don't you know what platonic means?"

"No, I keep telling you I don't!" Stan yelled back.

"It means deep affection without romantic or sexual attraction, like between friends. Or family members," said a voice coming from the house behind them.

For a second Stan froze, then he whipped himself around as fast as he could. Standing there on the porch, looking amused, exasperated, and annoyed, was the one person in the entire world that Stan had convinced himself he was never going to see again. Ford. "Hello, Stanley. What are you doing at my house?"


	9. Chapter 9

Ford. Ford was here. Ford was here and not walking away or slamming the door in Stan's face or yelling at Stan for daring to come around. Ford was here, standing there looking at Stan like he was willing to hear Stan out. Now if only Stan could make himself say anything.

"Ford!" Mabel, on the other hand, was having no problems talking or screaming at the top of her lungs. She ran up to Ford, actually sliding across the trunk of the car in her haste to get to him.

"Hey!" Stan objected. He might not know what to say to his brother, but he wasn't going to sit by while someone scratched up his car - the Stanleymobile had enough little dents and scrapes as it was.

Mabel ignored him, too intent on throwing her arms around Ford. Stan decided to let it go, partially because when he looked at the trunk, she hadn't actually scratched anything, and partially because it was too funny watching Ford's reaction to getting hugged by a total stranger. "I'm so glad to see you!" Mabel said.

"I'm sorry, have we met?" Ford asked.

"C'mon Ford, we both know you'd remember it if you'd met someone as awesome as me before."

"Then why did you just hug me? Stan, who is this woman, why did you bring her with you to my house, and why did she just hug me?" Ford was starting to get a little hysterical. That meant it was time for Stan to calm him down and diffuse the situation. Or at least, that's what it used to mean four and a half years ago, but Stan didn't know what it meant now.

"Don't be silly, I hugged you because I love you, obviously," Mabel said, and Stan wasn't sure that was going to help calm Ford down any. "And Stan didn't bring me here, I brought him here."

"Wait a second, you planned this!" Stan accused. The whole Prince Charming shtick and refusing to tell Stan what Prince Charming was like so Stan couldn't guess. And bringing up Ford last night before they got here. And probably the reason she didn't want Stan talking to anyone in town was she was worried someone would realize Stan had to be Ford's twin and tip Stan off that Ford was living here. Admittedly, it was so obvious she'd planned it, he probably should have realized it the minute he saw Ford, but in his defense, he had been in shock.

"I sure did," Mabel said. "I tricked you into coming to your brother's house, and I regret nothing."

"She tricked you into coming here?" Ford said, sounding a little lost. "I assumed you wanted to come here on your own. That you had gotten my new address from Ma so you could…" Ford's voice trailed off, like he wasn't sure what he thought Stan had come here for. That made two of them.

"I haven't talked to Ma in a coupla months. She told me you graduated and were working on a grant proposal or whatever but I didn't know you'd moved. I had no idea this was your place. If I had I wouldn't have…" _come here and bothered you_ , but Stan couldn't say that. He liked to think he wasn't the kind of person who went where he wasn't wanted, but if Mabel had said to him last night "I know where your brother lives and I want to help the two of you make up," Stan didn't know if he would have had it in him to say no.

"Right. Of course not." Ford said tightly, and what was that supposed to mean? Ford turned back to Mabel and asked, "So if Stan didn't tell you about me, then how do you know who I am and where I live? Just who are you?"

"I'm Mabel," she said, grinning hugely. Ford looked at her for a moment, then turned to Stan when it became clear Mabel wasn't going to say any more than that.

Stan shrugged. Truth was, that was probably the best answer she could have given. Mabel was Mabel; how else would you describe her? Finally Stan offered, "She says she's my fairy godmother."

Ford looked at Mabel skeptically. "You don't look like the fairies that I've encountered since arriving in Gravity Falls."

"Hold up, are you saying that fairies actually are real?" Stan asked. It wasn't that he didn't believe Mabel about her being a fairy, but it wasn't exactly that he did either. He kind of did and didn't all at the same time.

"Yes, they are!" Ford said, straightening up a bit. "I don't know how much Ma told you about what I'm studying, but my grant was actually to research anomalies. That's the reason I moved to Gravity Falls; it has a higher concentration on anomalies than anywhere else in the country, possibly anywhere on the planet."

"And when you say anomalies you mean stuff like fairies and, oh I don't know, merpeople and unicorns and zombies and gnomes that run around wearing little hats that a goat might hypothetically try to eat," Stan said, giving Mabel a hard look. Mabel grinned sunnily back.

"In fact I just encountered a gnome yesterday morning," Ford said, too excited about his science-y stuff to notice the byplay between Stan and Mabel. "When I woke up he was in my living room arguing politics with the stuffed bear head over my fireplace. No merpeople, unicorns, or zombies as yet, but I've only just arrived, so who know what else might be out there!" It was nice seeing Ford all excited again. Hey, at least when Ford finally remembered he hated Stan and kicked him to the curb again, Stan would know that he really hadn't completely screwed up Ford's life forever, that Ford had bounced back from the science fair incident. Stan owed Mabel one for that.

"What I have encountered before are fairies, and like I said, I very much doubt you are one," Ford said, rounding back on Mabel.

"Well of course I don't look like any of the fairies around here. All the fairies this far west are of Queen Mab's ilk and though, as you can tell by my name, I was given over to my lady's service at birth, by blood I am kinswoman of the proud Tatiana," Mabel said, with about three times her usual dramatic flair.

"Fascinating! So you're saying there are multiple different sub-species of fairies that look completely different? Was it environmental factors that caused the large divergence in the evolution of your physical appearance from the local sub-species or something else? Or are you in fact two completely separate species that just happen to share a name?" Ford reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a red leather book and a pen and Moses help him, he was about to start taking notes, wasn't he? That nerd.

"Ford. She's messing with you," Stan said.

When Ford was surprised he had this way of blinking that weirdly sort of made him look like an owl. He didn't do it all the time, but he was doing it now, and really Stan didn't even blame Mabel for the way she burst out laughing. "Your face! Oh man, why do you always fall for the Shakespeare? He's a great playwright, but he obviously doesn't know the first thing about anomalies."

Ford stared at her for a moment longer before chuckling a little himself. "You know, I think I like you. You're weird. This one is a keeper, Stan." Stan felt a warm glow at that. Not pride exactly, but well, there had never been any question of Mabel liking Ford, right, but it was nice to see that Ford liked Mabel too. Liked her and approved of Stan's objectively insane decision to throw his lot in with the crazy lady who Stan still wasn't entirely convinced wasn't a stalker.

"Of course I'm a keeper!" Mabel said. "Wait a second, when you say keeper-"

"I'm gonna interrupt right there before anyone else gets yelled at for saying gross things," Stan said. "Mabel ain't my girlfriend or anything like that. She's more like a cray, energetic, overly affectionate older sister."

"Awww Stan, you little cutie. I love you too. Air hug!" Mabel cried, holding her arms out in front of her like she was hugging someone.

Stan shared a looked with Ford, and Ford said, "I see what you mean. Okay then 'big sis,' maybe I should ask you the question Stan didn't answer earlier. What are the two of you doing at my house?"

"Oh, Stan's here to move in with you. I just came along for the ride and to help the two of you get settled in here in Gravity Falls," Mabel said. Stan knew that was her plan, but he hadn't known her plan involved just saying it straight out to Ford like that. There had never been much of a chance of this ending well, but now it really wasn't going to end well. Maybe Stan should just get back in the car now and save them all a lot of trouble. Oh, but Gompers had run off while he hadn't been paying attention and now Stan had no idea where he was. Probably in the woods somewhere eating gnome hats. Crap.

"I'm sorry, I must have misunderstood you. You couldn't have possibly meant to imply that my estranged brother was going to be moving into my house."

"Oh no, I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to imply that at all," Mabel said. "I was trying to just say it. Was I not being clear?"

Ford laughed. It was not a happy sound. "You haven't changed a bit, have you Stanley? I don't know why I was hoping for anything different. Still selfish, self-centered, showing up out of nowhere after four and a half years of radio silence because now you want something from me, and you expect me to fall in line with that." Stan hadn't been expecting anything. How could he have been when he hadn't even known this was Ford's house until ten minutes ago? But Ford wasn't done. "You didn't learn anything from the science fair disaster, did you? Obviously not, since this is the exact same behavior that made Pa-"

"Stanford Phillip Pines!" Mabel shouted. And Stan had thought he had seen her angry before.

Ford, who clearly hadn't developed any more of a self-preservation sense since the last time Stan had seen him, said, "That's not my middle name."

"It is now!" Mabel said, and this time Ford was smart enough to stay quiet. "You couldn't have possibly been about to imply there was anything that Stan could have done to deserve getting kicked out of his own home when he was seventeen years old and hadn't even graduated high school yet."

"I'm not necessarily saying he deserved it, but he could have learned from it, even if the punishment did exceed the crime," Ford said.

"And you could have learned to not be a total knucklehead by now, but I try to keep my expectations realistic. How could Stan have learned to be less selfish when he's already one of the least selfish people I ever met when it comes to people he cares about? It wasn't Stan's idea to come here; he would have stayed away until you called him, and then he would have dropped everything and come racing up here as fast as he could. I brought him here because for the past four and a half years he's been homeless and broke. I don't mean couch-surfing, struggling to make ends meet, I mean sleeping in his car every night and without enough money to pay for food."

"Hey, I wasn't always too broke to afford food. And I only slept in my car most nights," Stan objected.

"No helping," Mabel snapped, and Stan shut right up. "So Ford, if you hate your brother so much that despite the fact he's basically the poster child for down on his luck you aren't willing to put him up at least until he gets on his feet again, you need to tell me right now so I can kick your butt from here to the Nightmare Realm."

There was a long stretch of silence after that, until Ford finally said, in a very small voice, "I don't hate Stan."

In an instant, Mabel was all smiles again, beaming at both Ford and Stan. "See, I told you he didn't hate you."

Ford turned to Stan uncertainly. "You know I don't hate you, right?"

"I don't know that," Stan said. "I mean, how you felt seemed pretty clear the last time I saw you."

"I was angry. What you did… But that doesn't mean I hate you, or that I wanted you to be homeless and starving," Ford said.

"I wasn't going to tell you about that." Of course, before today Stan had thought he'd never see Ford again, but even after showing up on his doorstep and having Ford apparently willing to talk to him, Stan hadn't been planning on telling him about any of the specifics of his last few years on the road.

"Well, I think we should talk about it. Obviously there's a lot we need to talk about," Ford said. He bit his lip. "The both of you can stay here the next few days while we do. After that… well, we'll talk about it."

"See, I knew you'd get there!" Mabel said, reaching over to ruffle Ford's hair. "Sorry if I had to get a little rough on you just now; I wouldn't actually kick your butt. Well, yeah I would if I had to, but I knew I wasn't going to have to, so same thing."

Stan laughed at the look on Ford's face as he tried to straighten out his hair – a lost cause, that. "You're already regretting this decision, aren't you?" he said as he walked up to join the other two on the porch.

"No, I'm not," Ford said decisively. "Stan, I don't hate you."

Stan felt something shattered and broken inside him start to pull back together, just a little. "Yeah, well. I don't hate you either."


	10. Chapter 10

Stan hadn't exactly expected the inside of Ford's house to look like anything in particular. He'd only known that Ford had a house to have an inside of for all of ten minutes, and Stan had been a little too preoccupied in that time to make any assumptions about interior design. But if Stan had had expectations, he was pretty sure they would have been right on the money. The place had sort of a rustic cabin feel to it, which made sense for a rustic cabin out in the middle of the woods. Specifically, it had the feel of a rustic cabin that had had a mad scientist's lab throw up all over it, which made sense for a rustic cabin out in the middle of the woods with a freaking huge satellite dish out front. It definitely made sense for a place where Ford lived. Every available surface was covered in high-tech gadgets and weird specimens and pages on pages on pages of research notes. Meanwhile, every empty corner and space along the wall was filled with moving boxes.

"You really did just move in, huh?" Stan said to Ford while giving Mabel the eye. Somehow Stan suspected that this coincidence of timing wasn't exactly a coincidence.

"Oh no, I got here a month, month and a half ago now," Ford said. There was a beat before Ford realized why a person might look around and think he'd just moved in. "I have been meaning to get to these boxes, but there are so many exciting things going on up here it's been hard to find the time. I've mostly been unpacking things as I need them."

With that being said, Stan was in no way surprised when Ford led them to the kitchen and it was the least unpacked room yet. Stan and Mabel sat down at the little table off to the side while Ford sort of hovered there in the middle of the kitchen. "Can I get you anything? Something to drink or eat?" Ford asked, giving Stan a look. Stan knew that look, it was the _look at the poor, starving homeless man_ look. Objectively, Stan was poor and homeless, and while he hadn't been starving since Mabel showed up, he had been a lot of the time before that. Still, that look always rankled his pride even, maybe especially, when it shouldn't have.

"I'm fine, thanks," Stan said. He could go all day on the snack he and Mabel had eaten before leaving the hotel that morning if he had to; he knew that from experience.

"Maybe later then," Ford said. He stayed there in the middle of the kitchen, but that was mostly because the guy only had the two chairs and they were both taken.

The silence stretched out between them like salt water taffy, Ford standing there useless and Stan sitting there just as useless, both with too much left unsaid and nothing to say.

"Well this is awkward." Leave it to Mabel. "You know what I think? I think we're all a little in shock – well not me, I'm fine, but the two of you are in shock and should each go to your separate corners to think about things for a little while."

"Wait, are you putting us on time out?" Stan asked.

"I would absolutely put you on time out if I thought it would help; time out is not off the table. But right now I'm just saying you both need to get your heads on straight before we try to delve into a decade's worth of unresolved issues. They're metaphorical corners," Mabel explained.

"Well I guess we did just spring ourselves on you outta nowhere," Stan said to Ford. "If you need a minute…"

"…I think that would probably be a good idea for both of us," Ford said. "I can show you both to the rooms you can stay in while you're here."

"Okay one, I call dibs on sleeping in the attic room," Mabel said. "And two, I did say these were metaphoric corners, right? Stan absolutely should not be left to sit in a room alone to think; that is how he does some of his worst thinking. We need something mindless and physical for him to do; do you have a punching bag for your work-out regimen?"

"You have a work-out regimen?" Stan asked. Ford hadn't been completely out of shape in high school, but there was a reason he'd gotten D's in Phys. Ed.

"I don't, but I was planning on starting one – investigating anomalies is surprisingly physical work. But how did you know that, Mabel?" Ford asked.

"I know a lot of things," Mabel replied brightly.

"You get used to it," Stan added.

"Alright, no punching bag then. Hmmm, maybe we could do a tour of the house?" Mabel said.

"I thought the purpose of this exercise was for the two of us to go to separate corners," Ford said.

"Oh, I didn't mean for you to give us a tour. I meant I'll give Stan a tour, and he can pretend to listen while he thinks."

" _You're_ going to give the tour?" Ford said.

"I'll have you know I'm an expert tour giver. I learned from some of the best," said Mabel.

"I wasn't trying to disparage your skills, but how on Earth are you going to give a tour of my house? You've never even been here before."

"Yeah, that's not going to stop her," Stan said. It sure hadn't stopped her at any of the other places they'd been this past week. Heck, it hadn't stopped Stan either. "I could probably pull off a pretty convincing tour of this place too if I tried."

Mabel gave Stan one of those funny looks of hers. "That's definitely something you want to get permission for before you do it. But yes, I'm sure you could, but you can't do it mindlessly yet, which would defeat the purpose."

"I suppose I don't mind if the two of you want to wander around the house a little," Ford said. "Just don't go poking in any drawers and please be careful. Some of the things I have here are very delicate and I don't want you breaking anything."

Stan winced. Mabel saw him wince and immediately said, "Stan, no. That comment was very obviously not even a little pointed, and the two of you are already going to have enough trouble working through your problems as it is. We don't need you getting defensive before Ford even brings up his science fair project."

"I didn't mean that I think you're going to break any of my things here on purpose," Ford rushed to assure him. "I mean what reason-"

"Ford, I'm pretty sure I already said no helping," Mabel interrupted, but not before Stan figured out what Ford had been planning on saying. What reason could Stan have for deliberately breaking his things now? As opposed to Ford's science fair project, which Stan had obviously broken on purpose because he was a terrible person and brother who only cared about his own happiness and riding on his brother's coattails. Dammit.

"You know what, forget the tour. Clearly that was a terrible idea," Mabel said, cutting Stan off before he could say anything. Probably a smart move on her part; Stan had no idea what he had been going to say, but there's no way it would have helped with this reconciliation plan of hers. "Oh, duh Mabel. How about Stan unpacks the boxes in the kitchen here? And once we've pulled out enough stuff, I can get to work on making us all a big breakfast."

"I already… I mean, that would be great, thank you," Ford said. "If you don't mind, Stan?"

"Nah, Mabel's right; I think best when I've got something to do. I mean, I'll probably end up putting everything in the wrong cabinet and you'll have to fix it later, but I don't mind trying," Stan said.

"Anything would be a better organizational method than it all being packed away," Ford pointed out. "I guess I'll go into the other room and unpack some boxes as well."

"Don't be silly," Mabel said. "You and I both know that you think best when you're writing, or when you're thinking really hard about something else entirely. So you go get your journal and write for a bit. Or, if you think you need some time to process before you even start writing and you need something to help you think think-y thoughts in the meantime, let me know. I definitely have the challenge for you."

No way was Ford going to let something like that go, and from the glint in her eye, Mabel knew it too. "What kind of challenge?" Ford asked, coming closer to the table. Hook, line, and sinker.

"Ta-da!" Mabel said, reaching into her sweater and pulling something out. It was that thing that Stan had seen her with on that first night, and not since. It really did look like a tape measure, albeit one that was so banged-up it was only held together by the strand of yarn Mabel had wrapped around it. But when Mabel unwrapped it and pulled the two halves apart, it obviously wasn't a tape measure. Most tape measures weren't filled with complicated high-tech machinery.

"What is this?" Ford asked.

"It's broken," Mabel supplied helpfully.

"Yes, I can see that," Ford said, giving her a dry look. "What I meant is what does it do? When it isn't broken."

"What it is, what it does, those are all details. What's important is this machine is my only ticket home. I know mechanical engineering isn't exactly your forte, but I thought since you don't have to invent anything, just fix something that's already been invented, it was still something you could pull off. What do you say?"

Stan left.

He didn't make it far, only out to the front porch. He couldn't leave. He was at Ford's house, and Ford was willing to talk to him, and he had said that they could talk about Stan staying long-term, and in Stan's experience "we'll see" always, always meant no, but maybe just this once it could maybe mean yes. So Stan couldn't leave.

He leaned back against the wall and slumped down until he hit the floor. He sat there and tried not to think about Mabel needing Ford's help to get back home or the way she'd immediately known Stan was Ford's brother and sweet-talked him in taking her to Ford's house or how, when you came right down to it, Stan was just a dumber, sweatier version of Ford. He tried not to, but he wasn't particularly successful.

Stan had been sitting out there for only a coupla minutes when Mabel poked her head out the front door. "Hey, whatcha doing out here, frowny-face Stan?" she asked, coming out to stand in front of him. "I thought we agreed you and me would unpack the kitchen because you sitting all by your lonesome is how you do your worst thinking."

"You can drop the act," Stan muttered, turning his head to the side.

"What act? I promise I'm being 100% genuine when I say I genuinely don't know what you're talking about."

"I get it, okay? Your family sounds like a pretty good deal, so obviously you've gotta do whatever it takes to get back to them. It's fine."

"Is that what this is about?" Out of the corner of his eye Stan saw her crouch down in front of him, but he didn't turn to look. "You know there's a part of me that doesn't want to leave either. I could stay here with you and Ford, and we could kick butt as the Mystery Trio reboot. But I can't stay; I have to go back home, no matter how much I'll miss cute little baby face you."

Stan made a derisive noise. "Like you care."

"Of course I care! Hey, who loves you?" Mabel said.

"You talking about Ford?" Stan guessed. Technically all Ford had said so far was that he didn't hate Stan, but Stan figured there was absolutely zero chance of Mabel not taking that and running with it. And, you know, Stan was maybe a little more opening to believing it today than he was yesterday too. Probably that was Mabel's point. She'd used him, but no one had ever been this nice about using him before, and if Stan got his brother back from all this, then it was definitely worth any price of admission.

"Yes, absolutely Ford loves you. He loves you so much, just as much as you love him. But, and not to undermine this huge breakthrough here, he's not who I was talking about," Mabel said.

"I don't know, my Ma maybe?" Stan said.

"Stan, why are you so bad at this game?" said Mabel. "I'm talking about me. I love you."

"Would you knock it off already?" Stan snapped, finally turning to glare at her. "I figured it out. I may be an idiot, but I'm not a total moron. I know you only kept me around so I could bring you up here to see Ford so he could fix your dumb machine, and you could go home. Like I said, I get it. Just stop pretending like you actually give a damn."

Mabel sighed heavily and crawled over to sit down against the wall next to him, bumping their shoulders together. Stan wanted to pull away, but he couldn't quite make himself do it. "Your sad brain is getting to you again, huh?" she asked.

"My sad brain?" Stan repeated.

"Yeah, the part of your brain that's sad. You know, the part that always says mean things and makes you feel bad about yourself." Oh, that. Yeah, Stan definitely had one of those. "Everyone's got a sad brain, but yours can get extra loud sometimes. That's okay though, because I can get even extra louder," Mabel said, flashing him grin. "So Stan's sad brain, I've got a question for you: if I really didn't care about Stan, then why would I have asked him to be the one to drive me all the way to Oregon? You don't think I could have gotten together the money to pay for a plane ticket or a train ticket to here from Chicago?"

That was a ridiculous idea. Stan felt like he'd been making money hand over fist since he met Mabel, no way she couldn't have found a way to pull together enough for a lousy train ticket.

"You wanted me along so I could introduce you to Ford," Stan said, but that sounded pretty ridiculous too. Mabel hugged strangers on a semi-regular basis, what would she need anyone to introduce her to anyone for? Not to mention, with where Stan and Ford's relationship was at right now, she'd probably been hurting her chances showing up with Stan in tow.

"Okay, say I did. So here I am, super geared up to get to Gravity Falls, and there you are ready to drive straight there without even stopping for bathroom breaks."

"Hey, I stop for bathroom breaks," Stan objected.

"No stopping for anything," Mabel continued blithely, totally ignoring Stan's comment. "We've got a backseat filled with snacks, bottled water, and a collection of empty bottles to pee in when the need strikes, and no sleeping because sleep is for the weak, and all that works for me because I just want to get home as quickly as possible. So why then did I make us stop at every attraction, tourist trap, and kitschy museum along the way?"

To make all that money was Stan's first thought, but that didn't make sense either when he kept thinking about it. That first day at the yarn store Mabel had borrowed money – actually borrowed and paid it back – from him because her fairy money was no good here. It stood to reason that their money here would be equally no good in fairy land or wherever. Besides, even if she did want to make money, that didn't explain the times they stopped somewhere and didn't try to bring any cash in. It didn't explain why Mabel had bought him a pet goat, of all things. "I don't know."

"I spent time with you because that's what I wanted to do. And if I hadn't wanted to, then I wouldn't have. Life's too short and too full of amazing people to waste time on jerks. I love you, Stan; how many times do I need to tell you that?"

"I…" Truth was, the more Mabel talked, the more Stan believed it, the more he knew that he had known it all along. Mabel had put way too much effort into spending time with him and convincing him she loved him just to bum a ride. He knew that, but when Mabel had asked Ford to fix her machine it had somehow been easier to believe that was all she'd ever wanted than to believe she actually cared about Stan.

"That wasn't a rhetorical question," Mabel said after a minute. "How many times do you need me to say it for you to believe it, because I will say it that many times right now, plus one more for good measure."

"Five times," Stan said, picking a number at random.

"I love you; I love you. I love you; I love you. I love you. I love you," Mabel said.

Stan snorted. "What if I said I needed to hear it a hundred times?"

Mabel took a deep breath, then started speaking rapid fire, ticking off on her fingers as she went. "Iloveyou, Iloveyou, Iloveyou, Iloveyou-"

"Okay, okay, I believe you," Stan said, giving her a good-natured shove to make her knock it off. "Jeez, you will not stop, will you?"

"Never," Mabel said. "And I would never lie to you about how much I love you, or about anything. Unless I was messing with you, like with Mr. Gullible Nerd and Shakespeare earlier. Orrrrr, okay, full disclosure, Great Uncle's Day isn't a real thing; I made it up. But Hallmark totally has my back on this one, and we are going to make it happen."

"Good to know," Stan said. "Does that mean you weren't lying about being my fairy godmother neither?" She'd been committing to that one too closely for too long for it to count as messing with him, he was pretty sure.

"I don't know; you tell me," Mabel said.

Even after Ford's revelation that fairies were actually real earlier, Stan still wasn't sure he bought Mabel as a real fairy. For one thing, there was the other point Ford had made: Mabel didn't look much like any fairy Stan had heard of. Plus, this entire time Stan hadn't seen her do anything that could definitely qualify as magic, except maybe appearing in a flash of light that first night, but that was probably down to her machine. Stan wasn't saying it was impossible, he just wasn't totally convinced.

But being a fairy wasn't really what the fairy godmother was all about anyway, was it? It was what she was, but Stan figured what she did was probably the more important part. So there was Cinderella who was a good person and tried her best, but nobody around her believed she could do anything right, and the world kept on trying to ground her down into the dust. Then the fairy godmother showed up. She cleaned Cinderella up and sent her to a place where she could be more than a screw-up, to a new home where there was somebody who loved her. And yeah, Stan didn't know for sure yet if Ford was going to let him stay permanently or if they'd be able to work things out or if Ford still loved him, but that wasn't really the fairy godmother's job, was it? Cinderella and Prince Charming had to work out their own stuff for themselves, the fairy godmother just made the opportunity. The fairy godmother just made sure Cinderella got to the ball.

"Some ball," Stan scoffed looking around at the endless field of trees surrounding them, but his heart wasn't in it. The back woods of a backwoods town wasn't the kind of place he had normally liked to hang out in over the past coupla years, but the past coupla of years hadn't exactly been good to him anyway. Might as well try something different. Who knew; maybe Gravity Falls would turn out to be exactly the place for him. "Could be worse, I guess."

"Aww, Stan!" Mabel exclaimed, throwing her arms around his neck in a hug. "I love you."

Stan wrapped his arm around her. "Yeah, yeah... I love you too, you crazy fairy godmother." It was easier to say the second time than it had been the first time. Stan wondered if it maybe kept getting easier and easier. That would make a nice change.

"Ahem." Both Stan and Mabel turned their heads to look at Ford, standing awkwardly right outside the door. "I hope I'm not interrupting."

"... but you were hoping you could get on this? You bet you can! There's always room for one more in a Mabel hug," Mabel said. She let go of Stan with one arm so she could reach out toward Ford.

"I'm good, thank you. Still a little hugged out from earlier." Poor naive Ford. Mabel had not yet begun to hug him. She was some kind of hugging machine. Actually, if that turned out to be a literal statement, Stan would not be surprised.

"I'll get you later then," Mabel said. She gave Stan one last tight squeeze, then let go, shifting a bit to face Ford more fully. "What's up?"

Ford walked the rest of the way out onto the porch, coming to stand in front of Mabel and Stan. "I've been looking at this device, and I really do need to know what it's supposed to be used for. Beyond being your ticket home."

"Why do you need to know that? Can't you just, I don't know" - Mabel waved her hands wildly in front of her - "nerd magic and fix it?"

"I'm not entirely sure what nerd magic is, but no I can't. This isn't a simple case of a frayed wire or a slightly misaligned piece; the whole thing is falling apart. I can't possibly put it back together again or know how the pieces are supposed to be connected to one another if I don't even know what their function is," Ford said.

"Do you think Fiddleford could? I'm totally good to hitch a ride down to Palo Alto after I'm finished here with you guys," Mabel said.

"Fiddleford _McGucket_?" Ford echoed.

"Who else?" Mabel said. "If you can't fix it, then he's the only person I know that might be able to. Well, the only one that I can get to right now."

"I didn't say I couldn't fix it; I said I need to know what it is before I can. The same would most likely be true for Fiddleford. Besides, he's not in Palo Alto. I don't know where you got that idea."

"Funny story, that," Mabel said, then continued right on without elaborating. "Is he still at Backupsmore? In Memphis with his family? With his wife and her family? Where was she from again, I know I knew at some point… Michigan? Maryland? Something that begins with an M. Or an N. Or maybe a C."

Odds were pretty good that Mabel would keep guessing places all day if she had to, and Ford didn't look like he was in any mood to tell her the answer straight out, so Stan interrupted. "Look, I don't know who this Fiddleford guy is or where he lives, but from what Ford's saying it sounds like even if you manage to find him you'll probably have to tell him what that machine of yours is anyway. Can you really trust that guy that much more than me and Ford?"

"No, that's not what this about at all! I trust you both with my life. I trust you with Dipper's life – that's my twin brother, Ford. I even trust you with your own lives, which is probably a mistake on my part given some of the shenanigans you two get up to. It's not about trust; I'm just not supposed to tell anyone about the machine or what it does." Mabel sighed. "On the other hand, I've already done a lot of things since I've got here I'm really not supposed to do. In for a penny, right?" Stan didn't know what that meant – a saying probably, but not one he'd heard – but it looked like the question actually was rhetorical this time. Mabel took in a deep breath, let it out in an explosive burst, and said, "Okay. The tape measure is actually a time machine. It's called a time tape."

"You're some kind of time traveler from the future?" Stan said.

Mabel raised one hand and waggled her fingers like she was waving. "Hi. Mabel Pines here. Shermie's grandkid."

"You're _our niece_ from the future?" Ford said.

That was a lot to take in. Mabel was Mabel Pines, Shermie's grandkid, Stan's niece. Shermie's kid had only been a little baby the last time Stan had seen him, but somehow this was that baby's kid, sitting right next to Stan and actually older than he was. How was that even possible? Well, time travel obviously, but still, how was that even possible?

On the other hand, it did kind of make sense. Or it explained a few things. A lot of things, actually. Not everything, but a lot of things. For example, "That's why you said we'd never ever date." Stan had almost tried to ask his niece out. Stan actually had been checking his niece out. That was disturbing.

"Oh my God, Stan! Why does it always have to be about incest with you?" Mabel exclaimed.

"With me? You're the one who kept saying my own twin brother was my Prince Charming. I know, platonic, but I'm saying the whole incest thing can't be blamed on me. More like 50/50, something like that. Oh hey, I know we're your uncles, but are we your uncle uncles?" As in the two that she was talking about all the time.

"Technically we would be her great uncles," Ford said, sounding a little faint. You'd think someone who studied paranormal stuff for a living would be faster to adjust than this. Then again, maybe it wasn't the time traveler part that he was having trouble with, it was the Mabel as their niece – great-niece that he couldn't wrap his mind around. Stan meanwhile had gotten used to rolling with Mabel's particular brand of weirdness. If anything, after being half-convinced she was his fairy godmother, learning that she was only his time traveling niece from the future was a relief.

"More like my greatest uncles," Mabel said. "I just got used to calling you guys my uncles to other people because when you say 'great uncle' people always thinking crotchety super old man for some reason, not crazy cool paranormal investigators. Also great uncle is kind of a mouthful, but if I start throwing the word 'grunkle' around, people look at me like they don't know what I'm talking about. Same reason I say 'apocalypse' instead of 'Weirdmageddon.'"

"Yeah, that's not why they're looking at you like they don't know what you're talking about," Stan said. "Okay, second question, and this is very important: do I actually get to punch a demon into oblivion?" Because that had been a point of pride for Stan even when it was just a hypothetical.

"There was a team effort involved – Dipper and I distracted him while you and Ford got together your one-two attack – but you did get to punch him and that was the final blow that sent him shattering into nothing," Mabel said.

"Wait. Wait, wait, wait," Ford said, holding one hand up. "Mabel, have you been telling Stan about his future?"

"Well, yeah, but he didn't know it was his future I was talking about at the time. I wasn't planning on telling him I was a time traveler, so I figured he wouldn't put it together and would have forgotten all about it by the time the things I said happened to him." Mabel said.

"He knew you were talking about him just now," Ford countered.

"Well, yeah, but… in for a penny, right?"

"What kind of stupid logic is that?" Ford demanded. "You've already messed things up, so why not mess them up even more?"

"Hey," Stan objected, but stopped when Mabel put her hand down on his shoulder.

"Okay, this time I know I already said no helping, Grunkle Stan," she said. "And Grunkle Ford, rude. I haven't been messing anything up. I've been fixing things."

"You don't know that," Ford said.

"Hindsight is twenty-twenty, which means I'm the only one with perfect vision here, mister. I've been fixing things."

"You're going to fix yourself right out of existence," Ford snapped.

"What does that mean?" Stan asked. It did not sound good.

"Think about it, Stan. You change the past, it changes the future. Every single action she makes could have a myriad of potential unforeseen consequences, and that still pales in comparison to the changes that could happen by actively telling someone about their own future. She could easily end up changing so much it causes her not to ever be born in the first place. And depending on how time travel works, that in turn could cause a paradox that rips a hole in the fabric of the universe," said Ford.

"And holes in the fabric of the universe are a Very Bad Thing," Mabel agreed. "But that's not going to happen. There's this group called the Time Anomaly Removal Crew whose whole job is protecting the timeline from paradoxes and junk. If they haven't shown up, then nothing I'm doing is going to destroy the universe."

"Not yet. You know I think you were right in the first place. I'll get you Fiddleford's address, and we'll get you on the first bus out of here. Go straight to his house, don't talk to anyone you don't absolutely have to on the way, and try not to talk to him too much once you get there. We need to contain this as much as possible," Ford said.

"No. I'm not going anywhere until I've helped you and Stan make up, and you can't make me," Mabel said.

"Maybe I can't make you go, but I can refuse to participate in your little schemes until you see sense."

"You can. But no matter what you do, I'm not going anywhere, and I will make things very unpleasant for you until _you_ see sense. You're talking to the Gravity Falls Prank Competition's reigning co-champion for eight years running. Don't test me." The two of them glared at each other for a minute while Stan watched and tried to think of anything he could say that wouldn't make things worse.

Finally Mabel huffed and said, "Look Grunkle Ford, I promise there aren't going to be any catastrophic global or historical consequences here; the time cops are too good at their jobs to let that happen. Well, most of them are. Well, Time Baby knows what he's doing. If I really do mess anything up, they'll fix it."

"Including if you make it so you were never born?" Stan asked. He didn't know about the whole universe-ripping paradox thing and he didn't really care He just didn't want Mabel to be erased.

Mabel shrugged. "Maybe? But even if they don't fix that, if I can get the two of you together and happy, then that's worth getting erased. And that's my choice."

"Okay," Stan said. "Me and Ford agree to let you try and sort us out or whatever. I mean, having to make up with me isn't the worst thing in the world or anything, is it Ford?"

"Of course not," Ford said. "That's not what I meant. I was only-"

"Ford and I will try and make up," Stan said, talking over his brother. "And you agree not to tell us anything else about our future."

"But there are still things you need to know!" Mabel exclaimed. "I have to warn you about-"

Stan interrupted. "We're all good and happy in the future you come from, right? It sure sounded like it."

"Yeah, but not until after we got through all the bad stuff. And there was a lot of bad stuff."

"I got that impression when you started talking about the apocalypse, actually," Stan said dryly. "Look, so we've got problems. Who doesn't? We know we can deal with them, and it isn't worth saving ourselves a little bit of trouble if it means risking you disappearing. And that's my choice."

"Our choice," Ford added. Stan smiled at his brother. It felt good to be on the same side as him again.

Mabel looked back forth between the two of them then broke out into a grin. "You guys!" She flung her arms around Stan again and hugged him tight. "I love you, Grunkle Stan." She jumped up and grabbed Ford in a hug too. "I love you, Grunkle Ford."

"I… don't want to see you disappear," Ford said. "Especially not before you teach me some pranks to use on Stan."

"Heck yes! Alpha twins for the win. High six!" Mabel held her hand up in the air, and Ford, looking pleased, slapped it. Meanwhile, Stan wasn't feeling jealous at all, no sir.

Suddenly Ford yelped and took a few startled steps forward. Behind him Gompers came into view, looking like he'd just tried to take a bite out of Ford's coat.

"Hey there, buddy," Stan said. Gompers bleated and walked over to Stan, headbutting Stan's shoulder. Stan reached up and scratched the kid on his favorite spot behind his ear.

"Why is there a goat?" Ford asked.

"He's my goat. His name is Gompers the First. Oh hey, that makes sense now," Stan said.

"I won him for Grunkle Stan at the county fair," Mabel said, then her eyes went wide in horror. "Oh no, Grunkle Ford did you want me to get you a pet too? I didn't mean to be unfair. For you, I'm thinking you'd enjoy the prickly affection of the majestic snadger. Wait no, better idea, best idea. I'll get you a polydactyl kitten! We'll call him Sixer, and he can be your other twinsie!"

"I don't really need a cat, thanks," Ford said, looking a bit thrown.

"Too late, it's happening, it's a thing now. Though it might have to wait until after I get back home and have the internet to aid in my search for the perfect kitten. But it's definitely happening, so resign yourself to it now, mister," Mabel said, pointing at Ford and staring at him squinty-eyed.

"After you get back home?" Ford said. He smiled softly. "Alright, in that case I look forward to it."

"That's the spirit!" Mabel clapped her hands together. "And now that we've had two shocks today – well not me, I'm fine, but you two have had two shocks today, so it's time for us all to get in our metaphorical corners. We'll reconvene at breakfast. Brunch. Ready, break."


	11. Chapter 11

Even after they came out of their "metaphorical corners" for Mabel's surprisingly elaborate brunch ("I didn't even know I had strawberries," Ford said looking at the sauce Mabel had made for their waffles. "Or a waffle iron." "You didn't," Mabel cheerfully replied.), Mabel didn't let them talk about anything serious. She opened the conversation with stories of what she and Stan had gotten up to on their way over here. Ford actually seemed interested in listening to it; he was asking questions and making comments anyway. ("I can't believe that worked," Ford said, laughing. Mabel and Stan both gave him a look, and Ford said, "Ah, yes. I forgot who I was talking to.") It was nice being able to talk with Ford like this again. Heck, it was nice talking to him at all, but being able to chat casually and just pal around was more than Stan would have hoped for. They even started talking about some of the ridiculous things Stan and Ford had gotten up to as kids, to Mabel's delight. ("I'm always up for more tiny Stan twins stories! Bring on the Mystery Twins Classic!") Then without thinking about it, Stan mentioned the Stan O' War.

There was a brief awkward silence, and then Mabel asked Ford about a story from his college days. ("You blew up the science lab?" Stan asked, looking at his brother wide-eyed. "I didn't blow the whole lab up, just some of the things in it," Ford replied.) From there they got into talking about what Ford had been up to while off at college. A lot of the smart talk went over Stan's head, and Mabel's too apparently ("Oh, I have no idea what I just asked him," Mabel assured Stan after she'd asked Ford an especially nerdy-sounding question. "I've just been hearing these words for long enough to be able to make it sound like I do."), but Stan could still laugh at some of the crazy situation Ford got into. Even the nerd babble was kind of nostalgic to listen to.

Mabel kept that up all day, making sure they kept talking about lighter things that they could all joke around and laugh at. By the time Stan was settling down to sleep on the couch in Ford's "thinking parlor" – jeez Ford, really? – he was starting to think this was Mabel's plan. She would make them focus on talking about the easy stuff until they could build a new relationship from there. They would paper over all the bad things until they could leave the past in the past, where it belonged.

Looking back on it, that was a pretty dumb thing to think.

When Stan woke up the next morning, Mabel had already passed through his room at some point. He knew because sitting on the sofa next to his head was a neatly folded sweater with a note on top of it.

 _Grunkle Stan~_

 _When you wake up come out to the living room for brother bonding and fight mediation time. Breakfast will be served. Wear your sweater! And no cheating by wearing a long-sleeve shirt under it, T-shirt only!_

 _~Mabel_

Stan picked up the sweater, finding the yarn to be as itchy as he remembered. He unfolded it curiously – Mabel hadn't let him see them while she was working on them, which was actually impressive since she had done it all right there in the passenger seat while he was driving. He knew they were both the same red color, but there had to be something else going on for her to be so secretive about it. Stan saw the back of it first, which was just a plain red sweater, but when he turned it around he saw what it was Mabel had been trying to keep hidden. Written across the chest in yellow-gold letters edged in black was "I AM NOT HELPING." Apparently Mabel was really serious about the no helping thing.

Stan put the sweater on as instructed and walked out to the living room. Mabel was already there, ensconced in a chair made of red leather and elaborately carved woodwork that Stan didn't remember seeing yesterday. It kind of looked like a throne. Appropriate, really.

"Good morning Grunkle Stan! Please help yourself to some breakfast," she said, gesturing magnanimously to the spread she'd laid out on the dinosaur skull that had been repurposed as a coffee table. Ford was going to be thrilled about that. "We have fresh baked muffins, coffee, and Mabel juice."

"What's Mabel juice?" Stan asked.

"Delicious! Like if coffee and nightmares had a baby. I don't use plastic toys in it anymore – mostly – and I stick strictly to edible glitter," Mabel said.

"Where did you get edible glitter?"

"C'mon Grunkle Stan," Mabel said. She pulled a set of keys that Stan hadn't seen her with before – presumably hers. She flicked at an empty plastic tube dangling from the key chain nestled in between a few others that looked full still. "I always keep an emergency supply of edible glitter, rainbow sprinkles, rainbow sugar sprinkles, and mini chocolate chips."

"Of course you do," Stan agreed. It only made sense.

"Can you please get something to eat and sit down? The sooner we get started, the sooner we'll sort it all out and the sooner I can get this sweater off," said Ford, and Stan started. He hadn't noticed him already sitting in one of the two seats opposite to Mabel.

"Good morning to you too, Ford," Stan grumbled, but he wasn't all that upset. He could definitely sympathize with Ford wanting to get out of these sweaters sooner rather than later; they were even itchier to wear than they had been to hold.

"Good morning Stanley," Ford said as Stan grabbed himself some food and settled into the last open chair. "Wait, why doesn't your sweater say you're an idiot on it?"

Stan flinched. "Grunkle Ford," Mabel scolded, "don't call your brother an idiot."

"You called me an idiot," Ford objected. He gestured to his sweater, bringing Stan's attention to the fact Ford's sweater was slightly different than his own. They were both red with the gold lettering, but Ford's read "I AM AN IDIOT."

"I'm not your brother," Mabel retorted. "And when I call you an idiot, I'm saying it with love because I know you can do better. When you say it, it just sounds mean."

"I'm not trying to be mean. I'm not trying to call Stan an idiot either, even if he is a bit of a knucklehead sometimes. I'm just pointing out the disparity in our sweaters," Ford said.

"That's because I personalized them. Every Mabel original sweater is personalized," she said. "Yours says you're an idiot because you don't think about how what you say effects the people around you and it makes you do idiot things like accidentally call your brother an idiot. Then Stan crazy overreacts, which definitely doesn't help. It only makes things worse. And that's the real reason you two are fighting."

"That's not why we're fighting," Ford said in blatant disbelief.

"That sounds like an excellent place to start!" Mabel said. "Wait right here while I get my stuff."

She jumped up and ran out of the room, coming back a minute later wearing a pair of reading glasses and carrying a lined notebook, both of which Stan remembered her picking up at one point or other. In her other hand was the leash with Gompers at the end of it. "Therapist Mabel is now taking patients."

"Hey! What did you do to my goat?" Stan demanded.

"Gompers loves his new sweater," Mabel said, patting Gompers on the back right over the knitted purple sweater that read "SHARING GOAT" in bright green letters. Gompers bleated. He was probably agreeing with her, that traitor.

She handed the leash to Ford, who took it, looking confused. "Gompers here is the sharing goat. That means right now it's Ford's turn to share how he feels and we're all going to listen. You can comment or ask questions if you want to, but _you can't overreact_." She settled back down into her chair, adjusting her glasses and clicking her pen a few times. "Grunkle Ford, while trying not to be an idiot about it, tell me why you think the two of you are fighting."

"Because Stan ruined my life," Ford said waspishly.

" _I_ ruined _your_ life?" Stan said. "What about my life? I-"

"Grunkle Stan," Mabel interrupted. "Grunkle Ford has the sharing goat right now; it's his turn to share. You'll get your turn later. Grunkle Ford, now you're being deliberately mean."

"If I'm going to say the wrong thing anyway, why bother?" Ford said.

"Because you love your brother and you want to make up with him," Mabel replied matter-of-factly, and Ford didn't say anything to that. He didn't agree with her, but he didn't argue it either. Maybe Stan ought to have known Ford was on board with the whole thing, since he was sitting here wearing the sweater, but Stan would take as much confirmation as he could get. And sure, maybe Ford wasn't stupid enough to deny loving Stan right to Mabel's face, but he still could have. Like he said, Stan would take what he could get.

"Okay, let's try again. Grunkle Ford, why do you think you and Grunkle Stan are fighting?" Mabel said.

Ford sighed. "The catalyst would have been the science fair, our senior year of high school. My project that year got a lot of attention from the teachers and staff, and even got West Coast Tech interested in coming out to see it. I assume that I've told you about West Coast Tech in the future?"

"Oh yeah, I know all about those guys." Mabel's smile was one of her scary-sweet ones, not that Ford noticed.

"Then you know what a huge opportunity that was for me. I told Stan about it that evening, and I admit he was less than enthused, but I thought… well I certainly didn't expect what happened. On Friday my project was working fine, then on Saturday when I unveiled the project to the West Coast Tech board it was broken. On the floor in front of my project was an empty bag of toffee peanuts; Stan's favorite snack. I went home and confronted him about it, and he immediately admitted to sabotaging it."

Stan started to say he hadn't sabotaged anything, but stopped when Mabel held her hand up to him. Because Stan apparently wasn't allowed to defend himself because he didn't have the stupid sharing goat.

"Not only did Stan admit to sabotaging it, he immediately tried to get me to agree to go treasure hunting with him." Get him to agree to it? Ford had already agreed to it, Stan was just reminding him that not everything was falling apart, that they still had options, because Ford had a tendency to really freak out when things started to go wrong. "Like he didn't even care that my dreams had been crushed so long as we got to do what he wanted to do." Oh. That. Stan hadn't. Oh. "Then Pa came in, and you know the rest."

"Hmmmmm," Mabel said, looking at her notebook overly intently, especially considering Stan was pretty sure she'd just been doodling on it. She adjusted her glasses again and peered at Ford up over the top of them. "If I could ask for a point of clarification: did Grunkle Stan sabotage your project or did he break it?"

"I'm not sure I understand the distinction?" Ford said.

"If he broke the project that could mean a lot of things. It could mean he broke it on accident and decided to leave it like that. It could mean he broke it on accident and meant to tell you about it, but chickened out. It could mean he broke it on accident and didn't realize it until later when you told him it was broken. It could mean he broke it on purpose for any number of reasons, maybe to keep you from getting into West Coast Tech or maybe because some other time traveler came from the future to warn him that your project had to be broken to keep the world from being taken over by a crazed top hat."

"A crazed what now?" Stan said.

"I thought you agreed not to tell us any more about the future," said Ford.

"Oh that's not something that happens in the future… probably. That was the plot to a movie. I think that was the plot; I might be remembering it wrong. That's beside the point. What I'm getting at is if Grunkle Stan broke your project, then all it means is he broke it. If he sabotaged it, that means he specifically was trying to keep you out of West Coast Tech. So do you think he sabotaged it?"

"He was so obsessed with the whole treasure hunting thing!" Ford exclaimed. "Never mind that it was a completely unfeasible life plan, it's what he wanted to do and he was too selfish to care about what I wanted. He was willing to cost me my dream school so he could have what he wanted."

" _I'm_ selfish? You're the one living it up in your fancy house up in the woods, hoarding all your college money because you only care about yourself!" Stan spat.

"One time I kidnapped a boy band and held them prisoner in my room for three days," Mabel said. That got everyone's attention.

"You did what?" Ford asked.

"I know what you're going to say," Mabel said, holding her hand up. "I'm not supposed to tell you anything else about the future. But trust me, there are so many boy bands coming up, you won't know who I'm talking about until it's already happened."

"I think he was more worried about the kidnapping and holding people hostage thing," Stan said. Yeah, Mabel got up to some crazy stuff, but it was still all legal, more or less. Definitely nothing as extreme as kidnapping.

"I didn't hold them hostage; I held them prisoner – completely different. And okay, I didn't kidnap them so much as set them free from their crazed manager and bring them home with me. And technically they could have left at any time, I just lied to them and isolated them from any outside source of information to convince them it wasn't safe for them to leave. But, you know, we all do stupid things when we're kids," Mabel said.

"You think I should absolve Stan of any wrong-doing just because he was seventeen at the time?" Ford said, and it was pretty clear he did not agree.

"Did I say that?" Mabel asked. "No, my point is we've all done some terrible things, which means we've all had practice justifying doing terrible things. So if I wanted to theorize reasons why Grunkle Stan might have deliberately ruined your project, then I wouldn't have asked you; I could do it myself. What I want from you is to look me in the eye – no wait, look Grunkle Stan in the eye, and tell me whether you genuinely believe your twin brother would intentionally and maliciously try to destroy your dreams."

Ford turned to look at Stan, and Stan really wished Mabel hadn't said that. How was he supposed to look when Ford was looking at him like that? What was he supposed to do if Ford looked him in the eye and said he really believed that Stan would do something like that to him? "I…" Ford said. "I guess maybe; it's possible…" It wasn't a yes, but it wasn't a no either, and Stan didn't know what to say to that.

"Innocent until proven guilty," Mabel said.

"But he is guilty," Ford objected, tearing his eyes away from Stan to look at Mabel. "He's explicitly admitted to breaking it."

"No one's arguing _that_ ," said Mabel. "I was talking about intentions."

"But he did it. His intentions don't change what happened, so why should they matter?" Ford asked.

"They matter to me," Stan snapped. "Just answer the damn question, Ford. I'm telling you it was an accident; do you believe me or don't you?"

Ford hesitated. "When I found that bag of toffee peanuts, I wanted to believe it was an accident or some kind of misunderstanding. But when I got home and you confirmed you had done it… I guess it was just easier to believe it was on purpose."

"It was easier to believe I would stab you in the back?" Stan said. "How is that easier?"

"Because if I was angry at you, then I didn't have to feel guilty," Ford said.

Oh. That. "What did you have to feel guilty about?" Stan asked. For ditching Stan and their boat to go chasing after some nerd school? Yeah, Stan wasn't really happy about that, was angry about it even, but he didn't blame Ford. It wasn't his fault that what he wanted to do wasn't what Stan wanted him to want to do. Or maybe he was talking about when Stan had called out to him from the front stoop and Ford had closed the curtains on him? That one was all on Ford, but he had been pretty upset right then. Stan knew plenty about doing stupid things when you were angry; he didn't blame Ford for that either.

"My twin brother just got kicked out of the house. I didn't know where you were or what had happened to you, but at least I could comfort myself with knowing you brought it on yourself. I'm not necessarily saying you deserved it," Ford said, giving Mabel a quick look, but she seemed content to stay out of it for the moment, "but I could still say it was your fault that it happened, and that was easier. Because if it wasn't your fault, if it was an accident and you got kicked out of the house because of _my_ project, and _my_ dream school, and _my_ hypothetical millions of dollars…"

"I'm going to stop you right there," Mabel said. "It wasn't either or your faults. Your dad is the buttface who kicked Grunkle Stan out, so it's his fault. End of story. If I find out either of you two are indulging in your martyr complexes while I'm here, I will kick your butts. If you try to do it after I leave, then when I get back to the future I will find out, and I will kick your wrinkly old man butts. Got it?"

Stan didn't know what she was talking about "martyr complex," but he knew well enough to agree. "Good," Mabel said. "Now Grunkle Ford I think it's time you handed the sharing goat over to Grunkle Stan. Grunkle Stan, you said it was an accident that you broke Grunkle Ford's machine, so why don't you tell us more about it?"

Stan had already told Mabel all about it two nights ago, but this wasn't about telling Mabel; this was about telling Ford. Good thing he'd already got the crying out of the way then. No way he wanted that to happen now.

"Ford had just finished telling me about his nerd school and I went for I walk. I ended up at the high school and went into the science fair. Ford's project was right there and I got real mad. So maybe treasure hunting was an unfeasible life plan or whatever," and Stan couldn't argue with that or anything, given his experiences with it, but still. "Ford never said anything like that before, so I as far as I knew, one minute we had a solid plan to sail off and explore the world together after high school, and then all the sudden Ford wanted to go move to California and leave me behind to scrape barnacles off the salt water taffy stand in Glass Shard Beach. One minute we were a team, and the next I'm being thrown over because Ford cared less about me than some school he only heard about that day all because of this dumb science fair project."

Stan had to stop for a second then. He had been so mad then, and maybe he was still a little mad now. He just needed a minute.

"Then what?" Ford asked. Well, at least he wasn't automatically assuming Stan destroyed the thing anymore. That was something.

"You know me, I get mad and sometimes I just gotta hit something. But there was nothing around for me to hit, so I slammed my fist on the table. There were vibrations or something, and this little piece popped off, like a vent or a grate. I freaked out and put the piece back on. Everything was still going fine after that so I figured it was all fine, right? No harm, no foul, and no reason to tell you and get you all upset over something that already worked itself out. I didn't even know I'd really broken it until the next day when you came home all mad."

"You still should have told me," Ford said.

"Well, yeah I know that now," Stan said, rolling his eyes. "But like I said, I thought everything was fine. I was already losing you to some school on the other side of the country; I didn't want to make it worse. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what I ended up doing. The screw-up strikes again."

"You aren't a screw-up, Grunkle Stan," Mabel said. "But you did kind of mess up there. So maybe you should take a minute to think very carefully about what Grunkle Ford wants to hear from you right now."

Oh hey, Stan knew this one. "I'm sorry."

"Are you? Really?" Ford asked. He didn't sound like he doubted it exactly, so much as he needed to have it confirmed. Which, classic Ford.

"Yeah. I didn't mean to do it, but I did it and I'm sorry." Stan felt good, he felt… clean. There was no way this was going to be the end of it, but it was good to get it out there.

Ford nodded. "Okay. Apology accepted."

"What?" Stan said.

"Apology accepted." Stan kept right on staring at him blankly. Ford sighed, then held his hand out. Stan stared at that blankly for a second before realizing what Ford wanted and handing over Gompers' leash. "Obviously I'm not thrilled about losing out on my dream school, but in spite of what I said, you didn't ruin my life. I've got my Ph.D. and I'm working on a second and third doctorate right now. I have, as you so eloquently put it, my fancy house up in the woods and a grant to study exactly what I want to. West Coast Tech would have been amazing, but I'm still doing well regardless. That's not why I was angry."

"Why were you angry?" Stan asked. The way he'd yelled when Stan first showed up yesterday, there was no question that he had been mad about something.

"I was angry because I thought you'd betrayed me and weren't sorry and hadn't learned anything from it. But you didn't and you are and you have or maybe you didn't need to or… Well, anyway I forgive you and I'm ready to move past it now. I've really missed my brother," Ford said.

"Sap," Stan said, trying to pretend like he wasn't blinking just a little too fast. "I missed you too."

A burst of applause from Mabel. "I'm so proud of you guys!" she said, and she really was tearing up with absolutely no shame. "I barely even had to help you at all once you got started, and you made such good use of the sharing goat. This was so beautiful!"

"Great. So, uh, do you think we can take these sweaters off now?" Stan asked scratching furiously at his shoulder.

Mabel sobered quickly, wiping her eyes dry. "Not yet. First I have something to tell you Grunkle Ford. I know you already forgave Grunkle Stan and this shouldn't make a difference, but I think it might anyway. And if it does, that doesn't make you a bad person or anything, okay? The thing is, I'm pretty sure it didn't matter if Stan would have broken your project or not. Either way, you weren't going to get into West Coast Tech."

"What are you talking about?" Ford said.

"Yeah, Poindexter here is a genius. He would have blown that college board outta the water if his machine had been working," Stan said.

"Of course he's a genius! Grunkle Ford, you're in a three-way tie for smartest person I've ever met in my entire life, and that's only because I know Dipper and Fiddleford. And, you know, maybe that would have been enough for the college board," Mabel said, twisting her hands together. "It's just… okay Grunkle Ford, when I showed you my broken time tape, what did you do with it?"

"I looked it over, trying to figure out what it was, how it worked, how to fix it," Ford said.

"You didn't just see it was broken and decide it was a useless waste of time because it couldn't do what it was designed to do?" Mabel asked.

"No-o," Ford said, his tone changing midway through the word as something seemed to dawn on him.

"And you and Dipper are the science guys, so you'll have to tell me: in science is getting it exactly right all the time all that matters, and are the results the only important thing, not how you got them?"

"No, of course not. An invalid hypothesis can sometimes teach you more than one that was confirmed, and the process by which you get it is an extremely important part of any discovery," Ford said.

"Someone want to explain to me what the two of you are getting at?" Stan asked.

"When the people from West Coast Tech came they took one look at my broken project, then turned and left. They just crossed my name off the list without even asking about the theory behind the machine or my process or anything. They weren't interested in me at all." Ford said, his voice small and lost.

"I'm sorry, Grunkle Ford. We've talked about it a lot and we think that they had some sort of quota or PR thing they were doing. Maybe if the project had been working it would have knocked their socks off, and they would have let you in anyway, but…" Mabel bit her lip.

"Well good riddance to those guys," Stan said, voice full of venom. No one messed with his family like that. "If they're too stupid to realize you'd be the best thing to ever happen to their school, then that's their loss."

"Yeah!" Mabel said. "They're just a bunch of stuck-up, unicorn-hearted jerks and they're going to rue the day they wrote you off. Rue, I say!" Mabel shook her fist in the air.

Ford still seemed a little overwhelmed, but his lips quirked up in a half-smile in spite of it. "Thank you."

"Anytime. You just say the word and Grunkle Stan and I will drive down to Pasadena and punch all those snobby jerks in the face. Meanwhile, we've got one more thing, and then you two can take off your disagreement sweaters," Mabel said.

"What's that?" Ford asked.

"You two broken teacups need to hug it out. That's not just for now either; that's the rule for anytime you want to take the disagreement sweaters off," said Mabel.

Stan stood up. "Better do as she says. This girl is serious about her hugs."

'I've noticed," Ford said, standing up too, and opening his arms.

Stan was worried at first that it was going to be awkward. He and Ford had hugged each other when they were little kids, but they had stopped going in for that so much when they got older. That wasn't how men acted with each other according to Pa, and physical affection had mostly been reduced to shoulder punches and maybe some one-armed shoulder hugs. Stan couldn't remember the last time he had really hugged Ford, but he knew it was longer than four-and-a-half years ago.

Then Stan wrapped his arms around Ford and he forgot what he was so worried about. He and Ford just fit, same way he and Mabel fit, but better. Because Stan loved Mabel because she was his crazy older sister and his adorable little niece all rolled into one, but Ford was his twin. Ford was his twin, and he was here, and they were finally, finally together again.

"I really did miss you," Stan said without loosening his grip one bit.

Ford did one better and squeezed onto Stan tighter. "I'm just glad you finally came back."


	12. Chapter 12

AN: This is probably more of an outtake than an actual chapter, but who am I to deprive you of fun character banter?

* * *

Greasy's was not the best name ever for a diner, but Mabel had insisted, and really, Stan had heard worse, so here they were. She shooed Stan and Ford into one side of the booth before sliding into the other side herself.

"Remind me again why we had to come here when we have perfectly good food at home?" Ford asked.

"So what, I'm just supposed to cook for you all the time whenever you want, even if I don't feel like it?" Mabel demanded.

"I wasn't– I mean I could-" Ford stammered.

"Relax Grunkle Ford, I was joking. I don't mind cooking for you guys. Especially since it's the only way I can be one hundred percent sure my food isn't going to have body hair in it or get burned because someone got distracted by a burst of scientific inspiration." She eyed both Stan and Ford in turn as she said that. "No, we came to the diner for dinner today because in the four days since Grunkle Stan and me got here we've barely left the house."

"We have too left the house. Just yesterday we went out to the unicorn's enchanted glade," Ford said.

Now that had been a good day. Mabel had dragged them out to the glade where she had politely asked the girl unicorn with some ridiculously long name for a lock of her hair. The unicorn had told her that she'd need to pass a test of heart purity first, and then Mabel had gone off. She'd yelled at the unicorn, calling her a lying, manipulative, self-centered, self-esteem crushing jerk, then yelled at the unicorn's friends hiding around the corner for letting the unicorn trick people. Mabel had yelled at them for so long the unicorns had finally given her a chest full of treasure and begged her to go away. Funnily enough, the one thing Mabel hadn't gotten from them as a bribe was a lock of hair. When Ford had pointed it out later, Mabel had shrugged and said that it was the unicorn's hair and she didn't have to give it away to anyone if she didn't want to.

"Not that I'm in any way complaining about what we did yesterday" – seriously, a literal treasure chest overflowing with gold and jewels – "but Mabel probably meant that besides each other we haven't interacted with any actual people since we got here. Which is a thing you do need to do from time to time," Stan said pointedly. He was pretty sure that if Ford were left to his own devices up in his isolated cabin, he'd get to the point where he wouldn't even remember the last time he'd talked to another human being.

"Unicorns are people too," Mabel said. "But they're terrible people. And Grunkle Stan is right, you have to get out of the house occasionally to interact with good people. Like Susan, hi Susan!" Mabel grinned cheerfully and waved at the waitress who'd come up to their table.

"Hey there, stranger!" the waitress said back, grinning almost as wide as Mabel. "I don't think I've seen any of you around here before."

"That's because we just got into town not too long ago. This is the genius scientist who built that new cabin up on Gopher Road, Stanford Pines, and this is a completely separate person, his charming and charismatic twin brother Stanley Pines. The two of them, because there's two, are both going to be living in the new cabin. To recap, it's Ford, who has a cleft chin, and Stan, who doesn't. Ford and Stan. Stan and Ford. Two different people. Spread the word."

Stan glanced at Ford to confirm that what Mabel had just said was weird. Ford was giving Stan a look back like, yeah, it was really weird, but Susan didn't seem to be thrown by it at all. "Wow, I sure am glad you pointed that out about their chins – I thought I was seeing double for a second there! Though if you've got to see double, it's not a bad double to be seeing. And are you their sister?"

"That's a great guess! I'm Mabel Pines," she said. Stan expected her to stop there and let Susan draw her own conclusions, but Mabel kept right on going. "I'm actually not their sister though. I'm their great niece from the year 2026. I'm just here for a visit and to help them both get settled in."

"That's so nice of you to come out all this way to help out your family," Susan said. "Can I get you three anything to drink?"

Mabel glanced over at Stan and Ford, but they were both a little too in shock over Mabel having casually revealed she was a _time traveler_ to worry about things like drink orders. Mabel shrugged a little and said, "They'll both take coffee, black for Ford and plenty of cream and sugar for Stan, and I'll have… a strawberry milkshake; today tastes like a pink day."

"Coming right up," Susan said before sauntering off.

"Did you just tell our waitress you're from the future?" Ford demanded as soon as she was out of earshot.

"Yes," Mabel replied. There was a brief pause after that where Stan and Ford were waiting for her to elaborate while she apparently felt no need to.

" _Why_ did you tell her you're from the future? I thought you weren't supposed to tell anybody," Ford said.

"I wasn't supposed to, but now I've already told both of you, and why would I bother to shut the barn doors after the horses already got out?" said Mabel.

"You know she's got a point," Stan said, though Ford didn't look convinced. "If it's going to freak you out that bad, Ford, just tell Susan not to tell anyone else. She seems like a classy gal; I'm sure she'll keep it under her hat if we ask her too."

Now both Mabel and Ford were looking at him. Mabel had a mischievous grin and a glint to her eye that Stan absolutely didn't trust, and even Ford was looking a little amused. "What'd I say?" Stan asked.

"A classy gal?" Ford echoed. "The last person I heard you call a classy gal was Carla McCorkle, right before the two of you started dating."

"Well, I approve," Mabel said. "So long as you remember the conversation we had about respecting women."

"Of course I remember that conversation," Stan said. He remembered that they'd had a conversation about it anyway, and that right before that Mabel had threatened to cheerfully cut a guy's balls off for not being respectful to women. "Why don't you get on Ford's case about respecting women?"

"Maybe she doesn't need to," Ford said.

"Oh yeah? Maybe I should tell her about the time Linda Stevenson threw punch in your face Homecoming Dance senior year." Not that Stan would; he was the one who had fed Ford that line in the first place.

"Grunkle Ford's right. He doesn't need to be reminded to respect women," Mabel said, and Ford threw Stan a smug look. "He needs to be reminded not to be an idiot around people in general."

"Ha! She's got you there, knucklehead," Stan said, giving his brother a playful shove.

"You're the knucklehead," Ford said, shoving back.

"Boys, boys. We're all knuckleheads," said Mabel. "But I was being serious about being respectful to Susan, Grunkle Stan. Harmless flirting is harmless as long as everyone knows it is, but no leading her on, and if you decide you want to ask her out, just ask her out, okay? And then if you decide you don't like her, you tell her, gently, to her face. No running out in the middle of the date and ghosting her afterwards."

"Whoa, whoa, who said anything about me asking her out?" Stan said. Not that he was saying no to the idea, but he just met her. Harmless flirting sounded more his speed just about now.

"Oh you don't have to worry about him asking her out; he gets too awkward and shy. He never would have gone out with Carla at all if she hadn't asked him out first," Ford said.

"Yeah, she asked me out. Right after I punched out a guy who was trying to mug her. I was so manly she asked me out on the spot, even though I was dressed up like you, you massive nerd," Stan said.

"Why were you dressed up like Grunkle Ford?" Mabel asked.

"I don't remember, for some sort of good reason. Or a terrible one, one of the two. Anyway that was years ago. I'm way smoother with the ladies now. I even got married," said Stan.

"You're married?" Ford exclaimed. It was too bad their coffee hadn't gotten here yet, because that would have been an amazing spit take.

"I _was_ married, for about six hours in Vegas," Stan corrected. "Then instead of getting the marriage annulled she divorced me so she could take half my stuff, but the joke was on her, I didn't have any stuff." That made Ford and Mabel both give him a look, a 'poor, sad, formerly homeless Stan' kind of look. Stan liked that they cared, it just made him feel a little uncomfortable having them look at him so blatantly like that.

He cleared his throat. "So, uh, I'm thinking about getting a burger, what about you guys?" Thankfully, they let him change the topic, and it wasn't too long before Susan showed up again with their drinks.

"Here you are," she said, doling them out one-by-one. "A black coffee for our new town genius, a coffee with a big side of cream and sugar for our new town charmer, and a strawberry milkshake for their guest. How long were you planning on staying in town for?"

"I don't know," Mabel said. "My time machine broke, so I'm here until Grunkle Ford can fix it."

"That's too bad about your machine, but I bet these guys are glad to have you around, huh handsomes? So have you decided what you want to eat yet?" Susan took their orders, then she walked off again before Stan could think of something clever to say. Oh, like "I would have come to Oregon sooner if I knew they had pretty girls like you here." Yeah, that one was definitely a winner. He made a note of it in the back of his mind so he could break it out next time, hopefully not at the most awkward possible moment.

"I noticed this before, but she's being remarkably blasé about you claiming to be a time traveler, isn't she?" Ford said, which was actually a pretty good point.

"It's Gravity Falls. I figure there's a fifty-fifty chance she's either being a sweetie and humoring me, or she believes me," Mabel said.

"Wait a second. You're telling me people here are so gullible that there's a good possibility that she actually believes you're from the future?" Stan asked. Sure he believed it, but he'd know Mabel long enough to trust her and to know she wasn't delusional, mostly, and he'd had plenty of evidence. Susan, on the other hand, didn't know Mabel from Jack and had absolutely no proof, and she still believed anyway?

"Well, assuming she does believe me, I'd say there's a fifty-fifty chance it's because she's just that gullible, or because she sees weirder things before breakfast most days." Mabel grinned hugely at them. "Welcome to Gravity Falls, gentlemen. You're going to love it here."


	13. Chapter 13

When Stan came up to the kitchen that morning Ford was sitting at the table looking down at Mabel's time tape like it had personally wronged him. If Stan was being honest his very first instinct was to go find Mabel and throw her at the problem – actually it was a little surprising she wasn't already there, both because she was usually in the kitchen cooking up breakfast right about now, and because Stan was pretty sure she had a sixth sense for when people were upset. He pushed that impulse away pretty quickly though. Sure, maybe between Ford spending tons of time down in his basement lab working on the time tape and Mabel's near-constant presence, Stan hadn't exactly spent any time alone with Ford since… since before the science fair, but so what? Ford was Stan's brother, and they had made up; it would be fine. Stan could do this.

"That machine giving you trouble?" Stan asked. He opened the fridge and pulled out a Pit Cola – some weird local brand that put actual peach pits in their peach soda and was still growing on Stan anyway – then grabbed one of the blueberry muffins Mabel had made the other day. A perfectly good breakfast no matter what Ford and his extensive diet regimen thought about it. Really, if he didn't want Stan drinking soda for breakfast, then he shoulda made coffee.

"The exact opposite," Ford said, not even giving Stan's meal the side-eye for once.

Stan took a seat down at the table next to Ford. "What does that mean?"

"It means I fixed it," Ford said.

"Already? That was… that was fast," Stan said. It had barely been more than a week. Stan had been banking on having weeks and weeks, if not months before Ford managed to put that thing back together. He had faith that Ford would manage it eventually, but the guts to the machine had looked like they were falling to pieces from what Stan had seen, not to mention Ford hadn't even know time travel was real until Mabel had told him. It just seemed like it should have taken longer.

"That's why they call me a genius," Ford said, but his smile didn't look particularly happy.

"And you're sure it's really fixed?"

"I'm sure. I just completed the last test about twenty minutes ago," Ford said.

Stan narrowed his eyes at his brother. "Ford, please tell me you didn't test the potentially broken time machine on yourself. And people say I'm the stupid one."

"You aren't stupid," Ford said. "Stupidly reckless, certainly, but not stupid."

"I got news for you, genius: we're both the reckless one. Which, come to think of it, would explain why you tested the broken time machine _on yourself_."

"It's not broken," Ford protested. "And I didn't test it on myself right away. First I rigged a way to activate it without touching it and sent it forward in time by itself. After a few successful trials, I progressed to animal testing –"

"Wait a second, animal testing? Where's my goat?"

"He's fine," Ford said. "Now as I was saying, it wasn't until after the animal trials-"

"No. Ford, where is my goat?" Stan demanded. It's not like Stan would care if Ford had killed Gompers in a science experiment gone wrong – well, he might care a little bit. Okay, maybe a lot bit. Point is, if that had happened then Ford ought to tell Stan, and… maybe offer to buy him a new goat or something? He definitely had to be the one to break the news to Mabel.

"I told you he's _fine_. The animal trials went off without anything worse than some signs of mild distress from Gompers, and that might have only been because I refused to let him chew on the time tape. As to where he is right now, I can't say for certain, but as I haven't seen him or Mabel since I arrived twenty minutes ago, I'm assuming she took him on a walk." Ford pointed to the empty hook by the kitchen door where Gompers' leash normally hung. So that made sense. It also neatly explained why Mabel hadn't already been in the kitchen when Stan arrived, plying the upset-looking Ford with hugs and sweets.

"Okay, good. What about you then; you said you only arrived here twenty minutes ago? Did you take a quick trip to the distant future or something? Or the past? I swear Ford, if you went to go see dinosaurs without me…"

"Nothing that dramatic. Last night at 2:32am I set the time tape to take me forward six and a half hours in time. I activated it and then appeared in the same spot here in the kitchen at 9:02am. Mabel is usually in the kitchen around now, and I thought I could surprise her," Ford said.

"And he says he wasn't being dramatic," Stan said, rolling his eyes. "But you know what this means?"

"That I successfully repaired a time machine?" Ford suggested.

"Well yeah, that too. No, what it means is I'm the older twin now," Stan said.

"What? No, it doesn't."

"Yes it does. You skipped six and a half hours last night while I lived through them, which means I'm six hours and twenty-five minutes older than you now. The power! Now I know why Mabel was so excited about being older than me, because this feels amazing."

Ford looked at Stan with narrowed eyes. Suddenly he snatched the time tape up, snapped the tape out, pushed a button on the body of the machine, and then disappeared in a flash of light. About five seconds after that, while Stan was still staring dumbfounded at the empty chair where his brother had been, Ford walked back into the kitchen through the doorway. "Did you miss me?"

"What the heck just happened?" Stan asked.

"I used the time tape to go back in time six and a half hours. Then I hid down in my study until it was time for my past self to use the time tape. And now I'm five minutes older than you again," Ford answered, placing the time tape back down on the table and looking incredibly smug.

"Isn't the study the room I'm sleeping in?" Stan said. Ford had been hanging out there all night while Stan was sleeping? That was kinda creepy.

"No, you're in the thinking parlor," said Ford.

"I thought thinking parlor was just your fancy way of saying study."

"No, my thinking parlor is a thinking parlor." Yeah, whatever that meant. "My study is down in the basement."

"Your _lab_ is down in the basement," Stan said. That one he was sure on.

"They both are," Ford said. "It's a big basement."

"Okay, whatever. And just so we're clear, you time traveled for no other reason than to make yourself older than me again," Stan said.

"Yes? Yes, I did."

"Huh." Ford was giving him a look like he was waiting for Stan to tell him off for being frivolous or something. Because, yeah that was something that Stan was ever going to say to anyone. "That is an unreasonable degree of dedication. I can't even be mad... But I can steal the time tape and do the same thing for myself."

Stan lunged for the machine, but Ford was closer to it, and they both got their hands on it at the same time. A brief tug of war ensued. Then Ford said, "If we break this thing again, you have to explain to Mabel why her trip back home was delayed."

Stan let go. "That was a dirty play. I'm so proud; I knew you had it in you, Sixer."

"Suddenly I feel vaguely ashamed," Ford said.

"Eh, you get used to it," Stan said dismissively. He looked down at the time tape again and sighed. "So that thing really is fixed, huh?"

"Yes it is," Ford agreed, not sounding any more excited by the prospect than Stan felt.

"And Mabel's going to be leaving soon."

"Later today I would expect. Maybe tomorrow."

"We could just not tell her it's fixed for a while," Stan suggested.

"We can't do that," protested Ford.

"Yeah, I know." Stan had mostly only said it so Ford could shoot the idea down. Because if Stan hadn't said it then he'd still be thinking it, and he'd keep right on thinking it, possibly forever. Now the idea was out of his head and slipped away into nothing.

"So, uh, have you thought at all about what you're gonna do after Mabel's gone?" Stan asked.

Here was the thing about that: Mabel had been telling pretty much anyone who would hold still for long enough that Stan and Ford were two separate individuals – whatever that was all about – who were both moving into Ford's cabin here. And Ford? Never corrected her. So a person might be forgiven for assuming Ford was totally on board with the idea, even if Ford never actually said anything about Stan moving in permanently himself. Except the last time Stan had assumed Ford was on board for something because he never said he wasn't – at least, you know, right up until he freaking did – was with the Stan O' War. And look how well that turned out. This time Stan wasn't going to assume anything until Ford actually said it. Which meant the smart move would be to ask straight out, but then no one had ever accused Stan of being a fount of wisdom.

"I haven't explicitly thought about it," Ford said. "Maybe I should; things are bound to be pretty different once she's gone. Because of her absence in itself, of course, but also anytime over the past week when I haven't been working on fixing this time tape for Mabel, we've all been running along with whatever new crazy adventure she had cooked up for us."

"Okay, so I can see how maybe the double meaning of the word 'cooked' is confusing you, but I promise eating multiple full meals a day is not some zany scheme Mabel came up with," Stan said.

Ford rolled his eyes. "The point is she's been keeping us busy. I haven't gotten any of my normal work done at all since the two of you arrived. Which I suppose goes back to your original question: when Mabel leaves I'll go back to pursuing my research of the anomalies here in town."

"So you're going to work. That it?" Stan said, fishing for something, anything.

"No, I'm sure I will also eat and sleep on a regular basis. I might even bathe on occasion," Ford said.

"Funny."

"Really Stanley, I am an adult. I've been taking care of myself without any help from anyone for a while now."

"Great." Ford could take care of himself, and he didn't need a stupid brother hanging around helping him do it. Message received.

Ford stared at him for a minute, then frowned. "I said something wrong, didn't I?"

"No, you take care of yourself and I'll take care of myself. It's fine," Stan said, not quite able to look Ford in the eye as he said it. It _was_ fine. Stan and Ford had made up, and Ford was willing to talk to Stan again and might even be up for another visit in the future. He just didn't want Stan living with him fulltime or anything. That was totally understandable. It was fine.

"Oh, is that what this was all about; you were fishing for ideas for yourself? I didn't want you think I was trying to tell you what to do, but I did have a few thoughts in that case. I did briefly consider seeing if you were interested in being my research assistant, but honestly I don't think the grant board would be willing to let me hire one at this early stage. Still, you would always be welcome to come with me on my expeditions into the forest, and there will certainly be times when an extra pair of hands would be very welcome. Beyond that, I'm sure you could find someone in town willing to give you a job if you wanted one, if for no other reason than they're all so charmed with Mabel they seem to be charmed with us just through proximity. Or, I don't know if you ever ended up getting your GED, but I think that would be a very worthwhile pursuit if you haven't. I'd be happy to help you with any of the material."

Stan blinked at his brother for a minute, completely thrown by the total shift in perspective he was suddenly trying to process. "All those sound like things I might be doing if I was living here with you," he said slowly.

"Yes? I mean I guess I can't force you to stay if you don't want to, but… Wait, no. Yes, I can. I know you don't like to talk about it outside of vague, very disturbing, off-hand comments, but you were _homeless_. And unless you can prove to me you have a plan – a real, workable plan – to keep yourself off the streets, I am going to force you to stay here, whether you want to or not." Ford crossed his arms and gave Stan a look that dared him to argue.

Stan burst out laughing. "Of course I want to stay, you knucklehead," he said once he'd caught his breath.

"Oh. Good," Ford said, sounding confused, but pleased.

"Jeez, the pair of us," Stan said. "And what was with that condescending tone? 'A real workable plan.' You're lucky you're older than me again, 'cause no way I'd take that off a little brother."

"Does that mean I don't have to take it coming from you?" Ford asked impishly.

"You definitely have to take it from me. You may be older, but I'm still the alpha twin here," Stan told him.

"Oh yeah? Says who?"

"Says me."

Ford leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed and eyebrows raised in challenge. "Prove it."

"Alright, you asked for it." Stan jumped up, and before Ford could realize what was going on, Stan had grabbed his brother in a headlock. He pulled Ford out of his chair and rubbed his knuckles hard against Ford's head.

"Ah! Stop it," Ford said, trying unsuccessfully to squirm away.

"First admit I'm the alpha twin."

"Not a chance."

Suddenly Stan suffered an assault on his midsection, which had him letting Ford out of the headlock so he could grab his brother's hands instead to make it stop. "No fair! Tickling is cheating."

"Says who?" Ford asked, trying to twist his arms to force Stan into letting go.

"Says me," Stan said, twisting back. "And besides, six fingers is an unfair advantage."

"But Stan, I thought you were proud of me for playing dirty," Ford said with a smug grin. He finally jerked free and came at Stan to try to tickle him again, but this time Stan dodged. They went back and forth with that for a minute before Stan managed to get a hold of one of Ford's arms again. He twisted the arm behind Ford's back and then used it as leverage to force Ford down to his knees.

"Admit I'm the alpha twin!"

"Nev-ver..." Ford's defiant cry flattered and trailed off in the middle, and Stan looked up to see what had thrown Ford.

Mabel was standing there, pulling her pitcher of Mabel juice out of the fridge. Apparently they hadn't heard her come in. "Oh, don't mind me. You two just keep on being adorable," she said, grabbing a glass down out of the cupboard.

Stan let go of Ford, who hastily stood up and brushed himself off. "We are not adorable," Stan said with a scowl.

"As a five year old in pigtails," Mabel said.

"How was your walk?" Ford asked, a little too brightly.

"Great! Gompers and I went to visit the gnome queen. Turns out the current one is a wood nymph, and she knew exactly what she was signing herself up for, so it's all good. Actually, she seems more like a tyrannical dictator than queen to be honest, but the gnomes all seem pretty happy, so I don't judge." Having poured her juice, Mabel stuck the pitcher back in the fridge, then walked over to sit down at the table. "Oh hey, the time tape. How's that coming?"

"It's finished," Ford said.

Mabel sat up straighter, fixing Ford in place with the force of her stare. "It's finished as in…?"

"As in I've fixed it. I tested it out just now, and I can confirm it works."

"You mean I can go home?" The naked hope in Mabel's voice was like a punch to the gut. Stan couldn't even tell if he was depressed at the thought of her wanting to leave them, even though he knew that wasn't what it was really about, or guilty at the thought of having kept here as long as he had, even though he knew it wasn't really his fault. Maybe both. Probably both.

"Maybe," Ford said. "Honestly I don't understand much about how time travel works-"

"Very reassuring to hear from someone who just fixed your time machine," Stan said.

"I know how the machine works, mostly, more or less, but that doesn't mean I have a full understanding of how time travel and timelines work. Assuming there are multiple timelines, and that your changes here have merely succeeded in creating an alternate timeline that you'll have to find a way to transfer out of before you can get back home to your original timeline. But maybe there aren't multiple timelines at all. Maybe time is changeable and any consequence of what you've done here and how that's effected your own life you'll just have to deal with. Or maybe you won't have to deal with it at all because you've managed to undo your own existence and your continued presence here now is only the result of some sort of bizarre ontological inertia that will cease the moment you attempt to travel through time. I fixed this machine for you, but the more I think about the multitude of possibilities, the more convinced I am that you actually using it would be an insanely risky move."

"But in those multitude of possibilities that you mentioned, one of them's that I get back home, right?" Mabel said.

"Yes. It's possible, if not especially likely," said Ford.

Mabel gave a firm nod. "Alright then. No matter how unlikely it is, I've gotta try. I love you guys and I'm going to miss you, but I miss my grumpy old man versions of you too. And the rest of my family and my friends and Dipper. I know Dipper's still out there somewhere, he's gotta be. And if Dipper's out there, then I'm going to find my way back to him, whatever it takes."

"I get that," Stan said. And he did. He really, really did.

"I stand by what I said about this being far too risky, but" – Ford glanced over at Stan – "but I can't say I don't understand."

"I knew you guys would. Besides, in my experience these things have a way of working themselves out eventually." Mabel stood up and scooped the time tape up off the table. "Now I don't like long, drawn-out, mushy goodbyes; I love them. But I know you guys dislike them, so I'll try to keep this as quick and painless for you as possible."

"You're leaving _now_?" Stan asked.

"No time like the present. Or should I say no time like the past? Get it, 'cause time travel? You get it."

"But… you aren't even going to go get your stuff?" Stan objected. He just wanted another coupla minutes to get used to the idea.

"Stuff is just stuff. Plus, the first rule of being a loveable time rouge is always have anything you want to take back to your own time with you on your person, because you never know when the time cops will show up, and you'll have to flee from them, or get arrested by them. Dipper learned that one the hard way. Oh, but that does remind me…"

Mabel reached into her pants pocket with her free hand and pulled out a few crumpled bills. Then she reached into the other pocket and pulled out a few more. Then her inside sweater pocket. Then her left shoe. And she just kept going. All told, she pulled cash out of nine different locations on her and set the whole wad down on the table. "My share of our take from our crazy road trip, not counting what's in my bag and in the lining of my bag upstairs. You can have it Stan. I think technically this money is still good in my time, but it looks all weird and old fashioned and it's worth more now anyway."

Stan was quiet for what felt like a long time, staring at the money on the table. All that cash and Mabel was just giving it away, like she didn't care, like she didn't need it to prove anything to anyone. "Thanks," he finally croaked out.

"Of course," Mabel said. Of course. Of course she would just hand all that cash over to Stan, because she didn't need it, and he never needed to have money in the first place to be worth something to her.

"Okay Grunkle Ford, come here," Mabel said, wrapping Ford up in a tight hug. "I love you so much. Now, we agreed no future telling, but I can give a little advice, right?"

"I suppose that couldn't hurt at this point," Ford said.

"Good, because I was going to tell you anyway. There are bad people out there in the world, and you can't always tell who they are straight away. These people, they can lie to you and manipulate and take advantage, and maybe one day you're going to meet someone you think you can trust only to have them betray you. My advice to you is this: don't let that get in your head. Don't let yourself start thinking that everyone's out to get you and you have to do everything on your own. Ask for help if you need it. And above all, know that you can always trust Stan to have your back. You got that?"

"Yeah," Ford said, sounding a bit overwhelmed. "Yeah, I think I have that."

"Okay. Grunkle Stan, your turn." Mabel opened her arms wide for him and Stan grabbed onto her like he was never going to let go. "I love you so much."

"Love you too." See, it really did get easier and easier to say each time.

"You remember that." Mabel pulled out of the hug so she could grab Stan by the shoulders and look him in the eye. "That's my advice to you: always remember how much I love you. And if your sad brain ever tries to tell you I don't, then I want you to punch him right in his stupid face. Break his sunglasses, and possibly his nose while you're at it."

Stan eyed her. "In this scenario is my sad brain Pa?"

"One day, Stan, one day you'll believe me. And until then, if it's easier you can picture my sad brain for your sad brain instead. It's a unicorn."

"We each have our own different sad brains?" Stan asked.

"Obviously. I've never even met great-grandpa Filbrick, since he died before I was born and you nixed my idea of driving back to New Jersey to give him a punch in real life. He wouldn't make any sense to be my sad brain. Just like he wouldn't make any sense to be Dipper's sad brain and he only sort of makes sense to be Grunkle Ford's sad brain."

"Wait, you visualize Stan's sad brain as our father, but not mine? What's my sad brain in that case?" Ford asked.

Mabel opened her mouth. Closed it again. Stood there for a few seconds. "I believe I'm legally obligated to tell you to never mind all that. And on that cryptic note, it's time for me to blow this pop stand."

She took a few steps back from them, holding the time tape out in front of her. "I love you both. And hey, smiles. This isn't goodbye, this is see you later." Then there was a bright flash of light, and she was gone.

"Do you think she got home?" Ford asked a minute or two later.

"I refuse to believe any possibility except she did get home and we'll see her there in another fifty years," Stan answered, trying very hard to keep his voice from quavering.

"Stanley? Are you crying?"

"I'm not crying. It's just raining," Stan said, swiping at his eyes.

"We're indoors," Ford pointed out.

"And this is Gravity Falls. It could happen."

"I suppose it could," Ford said, sounding like he was humoring Stan. Stan would take it. "I'm going to miss her too, you know. And really, fifty years isn't that long, is it?"

"It's more than twice as long as either of us has been alive," Stan said. It was a really freaking long time.

"Yes, well… in the meantime, I'm still here." Ford offered that up hesitantly, like the one thing Stan wanted more than anything in the world was some kind of consolation prize.

Stan slung his arm around Ford's shoulders and pulled his brother in close. "Yeah you are." He took a deep breath. It got easier every time, right? "Hey Stanford? I love you."

Ford did his startled owl blinking thing, then slowly smiled. "I love you too."

"I know you do." And that was the truth.


	14. Chapter 14

Mabel woke up.

…That wasn't a good sign. In order to wake up, first she had to be asleep or unconscious. Last thing she remembered was using the time tape to travel back to 2026, and time travel had never involved falling asleep any of the times she'd done it before. On the other hand, there was no point in worrying about that right now. Worrying was for late at night when you were supposed to be sleeping but couldn't, and there was nothing to do but stare at the ceiling and turn your problems over and over in your head. Right now there was enough light coming through her closed eyelids to mean it had to be daytime, which meant it was time to get up and do something. Like figure out what was going on for starters.

When Mabel opened her eyes, she found herself to be in what appeared to be her room. Those where her walls with her pictures and that was all her furniture with her stuff piled on top and spilling out of it and her mess scattered all about the room and, now that she was paying attention to it, she could confirm it definitely felt like her bed with her mattress and her blankets and her pillows she was lying on top of. She got out of bed and walked down the hallway to the living room/dining room/kitchen area, and yeah this all looked like her apartment. She opened the front door and stepped out, partially to prove she actually could and that this whole thing wasn't some elaborately designed prison cell. She looked around, and yep this was definitely her apartment complex with her car parked in her space, and if she leaned a little to see around the next building over and squinted, she could just see her local park where she had found the time tape that had started this whole adventure in the first place.

Mabel stepped back inside. She shut the door and then clapped her hands in front of her. Awesome. She was back home. And she had almost laid around in bed and _worried_. Though that did still leave the question of how she had gotten home. In the past time traveling – ha! past, time travel – had always kept her in the same place in space while she'd moved through time. Well, it had every time except the last time, when she'd left from the park and somehow ended up in Chicago, but she had chalked that up to the time tape being wonky because it was broken. Maybe Grunkle Ford hadn't fixed it all the way and she had just gotten lucky that it's slightly broken wonkiness had dropped her off back home? It was a working theory anyway.

On to the next question! This was an important one: had she changed the past? That is, obviously she had changed a past, but had she changed her own past, or was what Grunkle Ford had been saying about multiple timelines right, and she had just changed the past in an alternate timeline? The alternate timeline theory would explain why Mabel still lived in the same apartment and had all the same stuff now even after making pretty extensive changes to the past. And, if the time tape had to drag her back home all the way from an alternate timeline, then maybe that had made for a bumpier ride than normal, and it had knocked her out. Finally, if she were jumping back to her own timeline it would make sense the time tape were trying to bring her back to the timeline in the same place she'd left it, and ending up in her apartment instead of the park was only missing by a little bit. So yeah, that all made sense.

Counterpoint, that's not the theory she wanted to be true. Of course Mabel was happy to help any version of her grunkles make up, but if she had a choice, then she would most want to help her own versions. Even if the other theory did make more sense, she couldn't prove this one wasn't true, and she would hold out hope until she could figure it out one way or another.

But how to figure it out? Mabel tapped on her chin thoughtfully as she looked around the room. Oh, duh, scrapbooks! She bounded over to her bookshelf full of scrapbooks and went to grab one at random, but then stopped herself. If she had changed the past in an alternate timeline before coming home to her own timeline, then all the pictures would be exactly the same, so that was easy. But if she had changed her own past, but still ended up in the same apartment with the same stuff, then she probably had a lot of the same pictures. She couldn't check against just any scrapbook, she had to pick one that would have pictures that were most likely to be different because of the changes she made.

The most obvious answer was the scrapbook from her and Dipper's first summer in Gravity Falls, but she couldn't make herself reach for that one. That summer had been one of the best times of her life and a lot of great things had happened that maybe hadn't happened anymore because of what she changed. And maybe other great things happened instead to take their place, but Mabel liked her own great things; she didn't want different ones. Even the terrible things, like Weirdmageddon, were terrible things they had all gone through together as a family. It was a good thing if Mabel had fixed it so Weirdmageddon never happened and no one else could remember it because they had never lived it, but it was a good thing she wasn't ready to face quite yet.

Her hand hovered over a few other options before she finally decided on the scrapbook about her and Dipper being born. Grunkle Stan had come to visit them in the hospital then, and Mabel had a picture of him holding the two of them as little tiny babies. If she had changed an alternate timeline, then the picture would be just the same as she remembered it. If she had changed her own timeline, and Grunkle Ford had never made a deal with Bill or he had but Grunkle Stan had known what was up and hadn't accidentally pushed Grunkle Ford through the portal or any of that, then Grunkle Ford should be in the picture as well. Mabel opened the scrapbook.

"What the heck does that mean?" Mabel said staring down at the page. The picture was the same, and Mabel even double-checked on the pages before and after, but there was no Grunkle Ford in sight. What wasn't the same was the caption beneath the picture. In the scrapbook Mabel remembered, the caption had read in blue pen, "Me and Dipper and" then the next part had been crossed out heavily with black Sharpie and underneath it in purple gel pen it read "Grunkle Stan!" This caption still had the part in gel pen and the part in blue pen, but there was no black Sharpie covering up the words "Great Uncle Stanford." Instead she could still see the entire original blue caption, reading "Me and Dipper and Great Uncle Stanley."

This didn't make any sense. If Grunkle Ford had gone through the portal, then why wasn't Grunkle Stan pretending to be him so he could save him? And if Grunkle Ford hadn't gone through the portal, why didn't she have any pictures of him in the hospital with them? There's no way he wouldn't have been there if he could have been. Even on the super off chance that he had been in the middle of some work thing and decided not to come down with Grunkle Stan, Grunkle Stan would have just slipped Grunkle Ford some sleeping pills, then loaded him in the car and started driving them both down to Piedmont while Grunkle Ford was too unconscious to protest. Ugh, she was starting to think scrapbooks alone weren't going to be enough to sort this out. What Mabel really needed was someone to talk through it with.

Dipper! Dipper, Dipper, Dipper, Dipper! Mabel ripped her phone out of her pocket and jammed her finger on the power button. She was thanking her lucky stars she had thought to turn the phone off on her first night in the past, because she could barely stand waiting for the phone to power up as it was. She couldn't imagine having to go find her charger, plug the phone in, and then waiting for the battery to be at a high enough level, and then waiting for it to turn on. When she finally made her call, the phone seemed to ring and ring for forever before finally, finally the call was answered and she heard her favorite nerdy voice in the whole wide world. "Hello?"

"Dipper!" Mabel cried, and it came out as a half-sob. "Dipper, I miss you."

"Did you have a bad dream or something?" Dipper asked. "You seem a little emotional considering we had dinner together on Friday night and just got back from a two week trip to Gravity Falls last weekend."

"Yeah, I know," Mabel said. Technically that was true, only last Friday had been almost three weeks ago for Mabel, three weeks during which she hadn't even known if she would ever see her brother again. She had always believed she would, because believing in something hard enough was sometimes the only thing that could make it happen, but believing wasn't the same as knowing. Besides, sometimes late at night when you were supposed to be sleeping but couldn't and so there was nothing to do but stare at a familiar ceiling except none of your favorite moldy spots were there and the space next to you was so, so quiet, it was really hard to believe. "I miss you anyway."

"Well I guess I don't have anything going on today that can't wait. I'll come over later and we can hang out, maybe go do something, okay?"

"Laser tag," Mabel said. Just in case.

"Sure, we can go play laser tag. But later okay? I want to get at least a few more hours of sleep in," Dipper said.

Mabel pulled her phone away from her face for a second so she could glance at the clock. Oops. She had originally left her time at sometime around three or four in the afternoon in Saturday, September 12th, and she'd meant to land back in her own time at about six in the evening on the same day, just to be sure she was getting back after she left. But she must have miscalculated a little bit on the length of the jump, because it was around six in the morning on Sunday the 13th now. "Sorry. I didn't wake anyone up, did I?"

"Just me," Dipper said.

"Oh, well _that's_ fine then," Mabel said.

She could practically hear Dipper rolling his eyes at her. "Yeah, yeah. Love you too, sis."

"Not as much as I love you, bro-bro."

"Is that a challenge?" asked Dipper.

"Heck yeah it is, Love competition, my place, 11am," Mabel said.

"Oh it is so going down. Be prepared to be smothered in love."

"Oh yeah? Well I'm going to drown you in love."

Dipper laughed. "Does drowning beat smothering? What even is a love competition?"

"I don't know, but I'm already winning."

"You can't be winning; we haven't started yet," Dipper pointed out.

"All's fair in love and war," Mabel said.

"… You've got me there. But seriously Mabel, I'm going to go back to sleep now, okay? I'll see you later."

"Wait no, before you go I have a question."

"A quick question?" Dipper said.

"Maybe?" She didn't really know if it would be quick or not – that kind of depended on his answer. "It's an important question, though." Mabel took a deep breath in and out. She still didn't know if she was ready to face this, but if it was coming from Dipper, she thought she could manage it. "Do you remember what happened the summer we were twelve?"

"Ummm… no, not really?" Dipper said.

"You're sure? You don't remember anything special or important happening that summer?" Mabel asked. And if nothing special had happened that summer then what did that mean? Ugh, time travel was so confusing.

"I don't think so," Dipper said. "Wait, we're talking about the summer we turned twelve at the end of, right, not the summer we were twelve and turned thirteen at the end. Not our first summer in Gravity Falls, our first time getting to know Grunkle Stan, and the summer when we save Great Uncle Ford from being stuck wandering the multiverse, accidentally helped cause Weirdmageddon, and defeated a literal demon, because yeah, obviously I remember that summer. A little hard to forget."

"Grunkle Ford still fell through the portal? And all that other stuff still happened too?" Mabel asked. But her scrapbook was different, which meant this was supposed to be the timeline she'd changed and she was supposed to have fixed all that. That was the only thing scarier than thinking she was the only one who still remembered Weirdmageddon: knowing that she had gone through all that work and tried so hard, and still hadn't managed to help anyone in any important way.

"Still happened? What's going on?" Dipper demanded.

"I-" Mabel screamed.

"Mabel? Mabel! Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, but I'm going to have to explain everything to you later. Assuming Time Baby doesn't vaporize me. If he does, then you guys have to have a battle royal for my stuff. Okay, I love you, bye." She hung up her phone, with Dipper yelling at her from his end all the while.

Mabel's apartment was on the second floor of her building. That meant that if Time Baby were to be floating in his little baby chair on the ground outside, his head would be at the same height as her window. Turning around to find a giant face peering at you was a little alarming, especially since Mabel was already on edge trying to figure out the whole time travel situation here. Now that she'd seen who it was and had a chance to catch her breath, she was fine. Plus hey, for time travel problems, who better to ask than Time Baby?

"Mabel Pines," Time Baby said as soon as she slid open the window. He had this particular way of saying her and Dipper's names, like he really wanted to be annoyed with them and maybe even hate them, but he couldn't manage to. A lot of super serious people said Mabel's name like that.

"Hey, Time Baby. Fancy seeing you here," Mabel said, leaning on the window sill. "If I had known you were coming, I would have baked you some treats."

"You couldn't possibly believe you could do what you just did without facing any sort of repercussion for your actions," Time Baby said. Well really he boomed it – Time Baby's voice was really loud. Mabel hoped he had some of those memory-baby wipes on hand in case someone saw him. It didn't make a huge difference to her, but Time Baby seemed to like to keep a low profile when pre-global domination.

"No, but I wasn't really expecting to see you here. Usually you have your guys bring us to the future, not to mention I wasn't really expecting myself to be here. I was in the Shack when I used the time tape to come to the future, not my apartment, so what gives with that? And how did I jump to the past from the park down the street, but land in Chicago?" Mabel asked.

"I cannot speak directly to what caused you to land in Chicago, other than to say that I would assume that the location stabilizer – the part that ensures you land at the same relative place on Earth despite the fact that spot is in reality hurtling through space at speeds your puny human brain cannot begin to comprehend – had malfunctioned, in which case you were extraordinarily lucky not to land in outer space somewhere." Wow. Okay, so probably don't use any more time tapes if they look like they're broken. "As to how you ended up in your own home, your most recent jump knocked you unconscious, and I had my people transport you back here while you were sleeping."

"Huh. Why did I get knocked unconscious? That's never happened before. Is it because I was jumping to this timeline from an alternate one, because in that case I think you should know that this isn't my real timeline; there's a different one I'm supposed to be in."

"There are no alternate timelines. If there were, then the Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron wouldn't exist. In a reality with infinitely many timelines all alternate timelines created by paradoxes would be equally valid, and there would be no need to try to force the timeline to configure to a certain path." Mabel supposed that made sense, though it was pretty easy to say all timelines were valid when there weren't any bad ones forcing him to put his money where his mouth was.

"The reason you fell unconscious was your great uncle failed to fix the time tape's inertial dampener. The stress of rapidly accelerating and then decelerating the rate at which you travel through time put untold stress on your body. Had you attempted to travel half a millennia instead of half a century, it would have killed you." Yikes. She was going to have to upgrade that probably don't use broken time tapes to a definitely. Who knew time travel could be so dangerous?

"Well, thanks for the lift home in any case. And how exactly did you know where I live?" Mabel asked.

"I know a great deal about you and your brother. I would be remiss if I didn't learn all I could about the people who between them have stolen a time tape on eleven separate occasions, won Globnar three times, and wasted three time wishes."

"Okay, one, we didn't steal any time tapes. We borrowed them without asking. It's different, because we always gave them back. Which reminds me…" She patted herself down, but failed to turn up anything. Maybe she had left the time tape back in her room?

"I had my agents take the time tape back when they relocated you," Time Baby said.

"Good, because I had definitely lost it," Mabel said. "Now two, of course Dipper and I always win at Globnar, because we are the best ever at laser tag, and that round is worth infinity points so it's the only one that matters, and also all the time cops are terrible at that game. They're really, really terrible at it."

"I am aware."

"All I'm saying is maybe you should have them play a round every once in a while. There's a pretty good place here in town they could come back in time to go to. Except not on Thursday nights, because there's this group of thirteen year olds that play on Thursday nights and they are vicious and they will make the time cops cry. Just a suggestion."

"I'll keep it in mind," Time Baby said. He wasn't going to keep it in mind. Oh well, more time wishes for Mabel and Dipper.

"And three, we did not waste a single time wish. The snadger is a majestic creature, and the world is a better place now that it's real, and infinite pizza is an awesome wish."

"You wished for infinite pizza twice," Time Baby pointed out.

"How is it our fault you messed it up the first time and we had to redo it? Infinite pizza means infinite pizza. It doesn't mean a slice of pizza that regenerates itself, but only if you eat it slow enough that there's always at least a bite left for it to regenerate from."

"It took two seconds for the slice to regenerate itself," Time Baby said.

"And you don't think Soos can eat a slice of pizza in two seconds? You really should have anticipated that," said Mabel. Time Baby continued to look unimpressed.

Finally she sighed. "Ugh, fine. If it makes you feel better, we agreed Dipper gets the next time wish and he's already working on figuring out what the best most perfect wish to get the most out of the time wish's power would be."

"I'm banning you both from Globnar."

"What?!" Mabel exclaimed. "Be more lame."

"I could vaporize you where you stand," Time Baby shouted, and the whole building shook with the force of it.

Mabel crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows at him. "You're going to wake my neighbors."

"Do you have any idea the amount of trouble you've caused with this stunt, how many rules you've broken?" he demanded.

"Okay you caught me," Mabel said. "I didn't actually read the copy of the Time Traveler's Rulebook you gave me. I re-gifted it to Grunkle Ford. He loves it, by the way."

"You nearly unraveled the fabric of the universe. I've had to create a team of time agents whose entire careers were spent correcting the timeline around the changes you've made."

"Oh." Mabel hadn't realized it was that bad. They'd messed around with time travel before and they'd never come anywhere close to unraveling the fabric of the universe, she didn't think. And yeah, Grunkle Ford had been freaking out over that possibility, but Grunkle Ford was always freaking out about something when he wasn't being stupid reckless – Mabel hadn't thought it was something to really worry about.

"Is that all you have to say for yourself?" Time Baby asked.

Mabel bit her lip, thinking how to say what she wanted to. "I'm sorry I made so much work for your guys; I didn't mean to do that. But… well, I really am sorry about the work and the hole in reality, but given the chance I would still do the whole thing again. I don't regret any of the decisions I made, and I won't apologize for them."

"I wouldn't ask you to," Time Baby said.

She blinked. "Um… that's not what I was expecting you to say."

"I told you I had a team changing the timeline around the changes you made. Didn't you wonder why I didn't simply have someone go back to retrieve you before you made any?"

"I'm wondering that _now_ ," Mabel said.

"You may be unaware of this, but when Bill first encroached on our dimension, I attempted to put a stop to him. He immediately dissolved myself and the agents I had brought with me."

"Ouch. You look good for someone who's been dissolved though," Mabel told him.

"Thank you. It took a thousand years, but I was eventually able to pull my atoms back together, to find that in my absence existence had not been destroyed and Bill Cipher had been vanquished," he said.

"Yeah, we totally kicked his butt," said Mabel.

"Indeed. Specifically, your great uncle, Stanley Pines, gave up his life so that Bill Cipher could be killed as well."

"Grunkle Stan did not die! He just lost his memories for a bit, is all. And he got them all back, mostly." He still had some bad days here and there when he forgot stuff or even everything, but not too many, and he was getting better all the time. It had been years since he'd gone blank for more than an hour or two, and usually it only lasted a couple of minutes.

"He might not have physically died, but he still erased his entire memory and identity with no expectation of getting any of it back. That his memories did later return does not lessen the sacrifice he was willing to make, nor does it make Bill Cipher any less dead," he said.

"Hey, do you think I could get that last bit in writing?" Mabel asked. "Grunkle Ford tries to play it cool, but we all know he's been worried that because Grunkle Stan's memories have come back, Bill's going to come back too."

"We shall see," Time Baby said. That was totally a yes. "But as I was saying, Stanley Pines did a great service to the universe, and to myself, at great cost. And now that debt has been repaid."

"That's good. How has it been repaid exactly?"

"Your actions in the past, as haphazard and ill-advised as they were, gave Stanley Pines the one thing humans treasure above all else: happiness. My role was merely to keep as many of the changes you made in place as possible. There are certain events that must happen as they do to preserve the fabric of reality, but otherwise your actions and their consequences have been left untouched."

"So that's why Grunkle Ford still fell through the portal," Mabel said.

"Correct. Stanford Pines had to fall through the portal so he could be saved so the rift could be formed so Bill Cipher could tear it open so he could invade this dimension so he could finally be defeated once and for all," Time Baby said.

Yeah, that made sense. Mabel still thought there had to be a better way to get rid of Bill that didn't involve Grunkle Ford being stuck on the other side of the portal for thirty years and Grunkle Stan having his memories erased, but she guessed when it came to Bill it was maybe a good idea to stick with what you knew worked. "But for the six and a half years in between when I left and the portal accident, Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford got to live in the Shack and be happy together, right?"

"For the most part," Time Baby agreed. "If you wish to know more about the changes in the timeline, I suggest you discuss it with someone else. I have important time business to attend to."

"Okay, I understand. Thanks for stopping by to explain everything. I'll see you later," Mabel said, waving good-bye.

"Somehow, I'm sure you will," he said, sounding all like he wanted to be annoyed, but wasn't again. "One last thing: I would recommend talking with your great uncle about all this. If you do, you may find his memory to be better than it was." Then he vanished. No flash of light, no _voom-ching_ sound effect, nothing. Just here, then gone.

Mabel wasted no time, rushing over to her scrapbook shelf and grabbing the 2012 summer memories one without a hint of hesitation. She already had it open and was flipping through, starting at the back and moving forward, by the time she was sitting on the couch. A few pages in she found what she was looking for: a picture she had never seen before. It had been taken right after Weirdmageddon; Mabel could tell not just by the placement of it in the scrapbook or the way the streets in the background looked perfectly neat and tidy while the ten people in the foreground looked totally wrecked, but by the looks on all their faces – deliriously happy, but wary, like they didn't quite believe it was really over yet. She knew that look.

She barely had eyes for the other nine people in the photo; all her attention was focused on Grunkle Stan. He was standing toward the middle of the group, with Dipper hanging off his back in a hug/chokehold and Grunkle Ford so close next to him they were almost pressed together down the whole length of them. Grunkle Stan's arm was thrown around Grunkle Ford's shoulders, or as close as he could manage with Mabel already perched up there. But she wasn't really looking at any of that either. She was looking at Grunkle Stan's face.

Right after Weirdmageddon Grunkle Stan had smiled a lot, but the smile was always kind of vacant, or hazy maybe. He wasn't smiling because he was happy or had something to smile about, he was smiling because he just was. But not in this picture. In this picture, taken right after Weirdmageddon when Grunkle Stan's memory should have been at its worst, he had a triumphant grin on his face, and his eyes were lively and bright. He remembered.

Because there was another way to defeat Bill, wasn't there? The magic circle thing Grunkle Ford had been trying to get them to do, but had fallen apart when he and Grunkle Stan had started fighting again. But this time, they hadn't started fighting, and the ten of them had – Mabel glanced down at the description on the page – Care Bear Stared Bill into oblivion. Oh man, that was so cool! And wait, if her grunkles hadn't been fighting then, then maybe…

Mabel flipped to a page toward the middle of the scrapbook. She didn't like looking at this particular page very much, but the scrapbook fell to it easily, like it spent a lot of time open at that spot. When it did, all Mabel could do was sit and stare.

A lot of stuff had been happening on the day they'd rescued Grunkle Ford from the portal. Grunkle Stan had been arrested extra hard, Mabel and Dipper had had to escape from the custody of federal agents, had found out Grunkle Stan wasn't who he said he was and started to think maybe he couldn't be trusted, had found a secret basement in the Shack with a secret machine that might have been a doomsday device, gravity had stopped working, and Mabel had gambled everything on her faith in Grunkle Stan. After all that, it would be understandable if she'd just stood there in shock and watched as a person had slowly emerged from the wreckage of the machine.

Yep, totally and completely understandable, but Mabel was Mabel, and she never missed a scrapbook-ortunity. So when Grunkle Stan had said the mysterious stranger was his brother and went in with his arms open wide for a hug, Mabel had gotten her camera ready. Just as Grunkle Ford's fist had met Grunkle Stan's face, she had snapped a picture. It was a great action shot, and Mabel hated it because it was the saddest thing she'd ever seen. She almost hadn't put it in her scrapbook at all, but that felt too much like lying. She'd put it in and titled the page "Mystery Twins Classic Grand Reunion!" Then she covered the empty space with mementos – the USB drive from the government agents, a little piece of portal rubble, a scrap from Grunkle Ford's portal clothes, a little piece of Grunkle Stan's notes from working on the portal, a lock of each of their hair – and sparkly stars and construction paper hearts and smiley face stickers and so much glitter, trying to put a positive spin on it. It hadn't helped.

Here's what had helped. Mabel traveling back to the past had helped. Dragging Grunkle Stan across the country to Gravity Falls had helped. Yelling at Grunkle Ford until he stopped being stubborn and let her and Grunkle Stan in had helped. Sitting these two stupid old men down and making them talk through their issues when they were still stupid young men had helped. And teaching her sad little broken teacups how to hug it out had helped. Because this time when Grunkle Stan had gone in with his arms open wide for a hug, Grunkle Ford had met him halfway. And just as Grunkle Ford's arms had closed around Grunkle Stan in an embrace, Mabel, who never, ever missed a scrapbook-ortunity, had snapped a picture.

Mabel looked at that picture for a long time. Eventually though, she'd moved her scrapbook over to the coffee table and got up. She went to her crafting closet, where she pulled out her smallest bin full of basic supplies – scissors and tape and Exacto blades and glue and the like – and brought it back over to the couch. She began pulling up the extra decorations on the page and moving things around, until she had cleared a space on the page opposite the photo. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a Polaroid photo she'd been keeping on her ever since she took it – first rule of being a loveable time rouge.

Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford were much younger in this picture as compared to the other, thirty-five years younger, more or less. They were standing in a brightly lit room, not a dark basement, and their tattered clothing was replaced with new matching burgundy disagreement sweaters. Those were all just details though. Really, the two pictures were exactly the same. They belonged together.

As Mabel was making the final adjustments to the page, the front door banged open. "Mabel!" Dipper cried, looking like he'd run all the way here from his place.

"Dipper!" She slammed into his arms, hugging him as tight as she could. He held her back just as tight, so tight she could barely breathe, and that was just so perfect that she started to cry. Only a little though, because what was there to cry about anymore? Mabel had fixed everything, and now she was home, and Dipper was here, and everything was going to be okay. No, scratch that. Everything was going to be great.

* * *

AN: So who was surprised that Time Baby showed up and straighten everything out for Mabel? No one. No one should be surprised by this. Mabel told you it was going to happen, plus Time Baby has been in the character tags from the word go. C'mon guys. ;)

And with that my lovelies, this story has come to a close. Thank you so much to everyone who favorited and and who reviewed this story. It always made my day to hear all the wonderful things you all had to say, and I feel so blessed to get to spend this time with you all. An extra special thanks to all you who stuck with me here through the erratic posting schedule and occasional long hiatuses. And an only slightly less special thanks to those of you who ditched me during the long hiatuses, but jumped back on board when you saw I was posting at a reasonable pace again. :P

It's been a wild ride y'all. I hope you all had as much fun as Mabel and I did.


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